This spring, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center awarded the University of Rhode Island $150,000 to create a Center of Excellence in Undersea Technology. The center is the first of its kind in the nation sponsored by the Navy to develop important dual-use technology with marine applications. Providence Business News spoke with Malcolm L. Spaulding, a professor of ocean engineering and director of the center, about its mission and the kinds of projects it will be working on.

PBN: What’s the rationale behind having the center focus on dual-purpose technology, technology for military and civilian purposes?

SPAULDING: A lot of the things that the Navy is interested in, the civilian community is interested in. For example, ocean observing. The Navy is interested in ocean observing problems because that’s the area in which they operate. The civilian use for that is in monitoring the environment so you can better manage the environment and the resources in it.

PBN: Are there security concerns regarding what the center does?

SPAULDING: The university can’t perform classified work. We make sure that the material that we’re working on is not classified.

PBN: How does the role of the center as a coordinator work?

SPAULDING: We try to identify opportunities where research is required, that the Navy needs – ideally that research will be very useful to meet some civilian need – and then we try to identify individuals who … could work cooperatively together to pursue that research project or activity.

That’s on the research side. On the education side, what we’re trying to do is develop graduate education programs that give our staff education and training better focused on the demands of the lab in terms of undersea technology.

PBN: What kind of environmental projects will the center be considering?

SPAULDING: One of our lead projects is an integrated observing and visualization system. The system has a series of platforms that collect environmental data. The platforms are called vertical profilers. Picture this buoyant thing that’s tied by a cable to the seabed and on command, using a winch, can go up and down through the water column. It has a suite of instruments to measure things like salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen and nutrients. At the same time, an autonomous underwater vehicle drives through the water and samples those same things.

Later this summer, we will be testing that system. The problem is, you want to know the horizontal extent of what the profiler finds. To look at the horizontal extent, you have to have a large number of profilers, and they’re very expensive.

What we’re doing is combining the profiler technology and the AUV [autonomous underwater vehicle] technology through a communication link so one can talk to the other. So the profiler can say to the AUV, “I’m seeing some very low dissolved oxygen here. Please go take a look and see what the horizontal extent of this low-profile is.”

PBN: Why would the Navy be interested in that?

SPAULDING: Suppose you had a case where there was a mine in a harbor. Mines leak a little bit of explosive, TNT, into the water. A profiler could sense the TNT in the water but it wouldn’t know where it is. The profiler could tell the AUV to go take a look and find out where this TNT plume is coming from.

PBN: What kind of ocean energy projects might interest the center?

SPAULDING: We have one that’s actively under way. If you have an instrument that’s operating offshore, you need power for that instrument. Typically the distance is too far to run a cable from shore. So you put some batteries in there, try to make the power requirements of the instrument as low as possible, and then when the battery is about to run out, you pull the instrument, change the batteries and put the instrument back in the water.

What we’re trying to do is use wave energy to provide a trickle charge to the batteries. We’ve developed a linear generator. It works like a shake flashlight. Where your hand helps generate power with the shake flashlight, we use the motion of the waves to move a magnet up and down through a coil to generate power that is stored in a battery.

PBN: Is harbor security another fertile area for study?

SPAULDING: People running port operations are particularly concerned with divers that can put explosives on the sides of vessels. The problem there is in addition to damaging the vessel, you end up tying up the port.

The first problem is, finding the divers. Detecting them underwater is very difficult because the human body is about the same density as seawater. The way you typically find them acoustically is through their air bubbles.

When you do find them, you can have an acoustic system that operates at various power levels. At the lowest level, it might make a racket in the water. At higher levels, it starts to shake them. At really high levels, you could kill them.