Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division (NSWC IHD) welcomed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Dr. Stefanie Tompkins to meet with leadership and tour its facilities in Indian Head, Maryland, Oct. 30.
“As the Navy’s sole full-spectrum Arsenal, I can’t overstate the importance of Indian Head Division’s relationship with DARPA,” NSWC IHD Commanding Officer Capt. Steve Duba said. “Research, development and production of cutting-edge energetics at the scale and speed the nation requires is vital to the munitions industrial base.”
The visit brought together the heads of two mission-driven organizations who are at the core of innovation for the Department of Defense (DoD). DARPA invests in breakthrough technologies for national security, and their alternative contracting vehicles transform concepts into capabilities. As the Navy’s premier public arsenal and center for energetics research, development and manufacturing, NSWC IHD has a rich history of advancing state-of-the-art products and materials to meet wartime munitions and energetic demand.
“Our partnership with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division and other science and technology counterparts in the Services is crucial for DARPA’s ability to test and advance revolutionary technologies that will serve the warfighter and benefit national security,” said Dr. Stefanie Tompkins, DARPA director. “We’re grateful for [the command’s] willingness to lean forward in adopting new technologies and are truly impressed by the expertise of everyone we met.”
NSWC IHD Technical Director Ashley Johnson echoed this thought. “It’s important to us that DARPA is here because they are the pinnacle within the defense community for pushing the envelope for what’s possible. It’s significant that a DoD organization is defining what’s important in the area of energetics, not just the Navy,” he said. “We’re excited to have such a high-level DoD partner to explore manufacturing technology and change the paradigm of manufacturing in energetics.”
DARPA and NSWC IHD are collaborating on multiple programs with the goal of producing energetics for the warfighter. The Rational Integrated Design of Energetics (RIDE) is a three-phase program funded by DARPA to prototype the versatility of the SynFORTE system. The suite of equipment, developed by SRI International, offers semi-automated synthesis and formulation capabilities that use automated flow chemistry to more efficiently process properties of new molecules for energetics. NSWC IHD has installed the SynFORTE equipment and is currently exercising and validating its utility with a variety of Navy applications and demands.
“The ability to rapidly prototype energetic formulations in an operator agnostic environment is critical to quickly respond to warfighting needs,” said NSWC IHD Product & Process Scale-up Manufacturing Technology Division scientist Dr. David Boruta, who serves as the command’s program manager for the RIDE program.
Another effort is the Process Intensified Energetics (PIE), a program under DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office working to safely turn readily available materials into reliable energetics through small-scale propellant and explosive testing. NSWC IHD is providing subject matter expertise to help DARPA develop an adaptive process and software to best execute the PIE program.
During her visit, Dr. Tompkins witnessed a RIDE platform demonstration and toured multiple NSWC IHD manufacturing facilities that are benefitting from the collaborations with DARPA.
NSWC IHD — a field activity of the Naval Sea Systems Command and part of the Navy’s Science and Engineering Establishment — is the leader in ordnance, energetics, and EOD solutions. The Division focuses on energetics research, development, testing, evaluation, in-service support, manufacturing and disposal; and provides warfighters solutions to detect, locate, access, identify, render safe, recover, exploit and dispose of explosive ordnance threats.
