BAE has successfully completed repairs on the second of two turbo generator shafts on the £1.2bn first-of-class Astute submarine, damaged in harbour trials last August.Of course, they won't know how successful the repairs actually were until they get to spin them up again, and even then I could imagine their noise performance might suffer. Still, I'm impressed that they could at least get the roundness fixed doing the job in-place.
The company hired a firm which specialises in marine in-situ repairs to reprofile the shafts after they were scored by turning unlubricated in bearings after an oil pump broke down.
Now the shafts are reprofiled an exhaustive series of operations is taking place to flush the turbo generators with oil to remove any unwanted particles that could damage the machinery.
When flushing tests are complete work will begin to re-instate equipment in the confined aft space of the submarine which had to be moved to get at the generators.
Even so, I expect that whatever gremlins moved into the SSTGs prior to the test might make themselves known in the future. Equipment that just never works quite right is, I'm sure, a tradition "enjoyed" by all submariners worldwide.
