Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division tests ships and ship systems for integration into the U.S. Navy and is host to some of the most unique and interesting test sites in America, including its massive indoor "ocean" which is used to test ship designs in various ocean conditions.
The Navy's Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin (MASK) is located in Bethesda, Maryland and contains over 12 million gallons of water. At twenty feet deep, the pool of simulated sea water is 240 feet wide and 360 feet long. A system of air-powered fins along the sides of the basin creates the simulated waves which are tested against different types of model ships that are placed in the water.
MASK was originally built back in 1962 but was renovated in 2013.
"There are many different kinds of waves," explained NSWC engineer Calvin Krishen. "Waves are different in different parts of the world, and they are different depending if you are close to shore, or away from shore or whether you're in a storm or not. We actually have the capability of programming all those different types of waves to test."
"We can nail, at scale, the conditions all over the world," Naval Architecture and Engineering Department head Jon Etxegoien said. "So it's not just that we can do some kind of rogue sea states, we can actually do the kind of seas they can expect in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, littoral areas, that sort of thing. So that's what gives us a real leg up. It's not just some generic sea condition, but the specifics of where they're going to be operating."
"As long as we've been building ships and boats, we really have only started understanding how they really work in about the last hundred years," Etxegoien said. "This facility gives us that understanding."