| SS-108 - The California
Boat The "Submarine Of California" (SS-108)
was never built.
Construction of this submarine was to have incorporated the "Neff"
propulsion system. This system was designed to eliminate the motors
and storage batteries normally used in subsurface propulsion, using in
their place the diesel engines used for surface propulsion. Compressed
air, stored on board, was to have supported the combustion cycle of
the diesel engines, while a collector device was to dispose of the
diesel engine exhaust gases. Proponents of this system sought to
increase the submarine's submerged range and speed. However, design
limitations, such as weight and space requirements for the compressed
air handling equipment, dangers in handling the toxic exhaust gases of
the diesel engines, and excessive noise that would have been generated
by these novel equipments, caused plans for SS-108 to be cancelled.
More specific information follows
regarding this unique
propulsion system for the "Submarine of California"...so named because
the patent holder intended to build the Neff system and, hopefully,
the submarine to be propelled by it, in California.
Several attempts were made by the
United States Navy to give
submersibles the ability to maintain high underwater speeds...during
the early stages of submarine design and development.
One such attempt was the Cage
(later Neff) system, which was a
1912 private proposal. Cage planned to run diesels underwater on air
stowed under pressure.
Cage was general manager of the
new Los Angeles Submarine Boat
Company of Long Beach, California, which bid on SS-40 to SS-47 in
August of 1912. The bid was rejected because of the company's
inexperience, but the Navy was interested enough in the engine to
appoint several boards to examine the company's claims. In June of
1913, Cage claimed that he had remained underwater for thirty-six
hours (breaking a record set by USS Octopus, C-1), while running a gas
engine without fumes in the boat. In November, a trials board objected
that a full-size submarine could not accommodate enough air. Even so,
the Navy offered a West Coast H-boat or K-boat for trials. The system
was to be installed at a navy yard at company expense, but the fleet
commander was unwilling to divert an operational submarine in
increasingly dangerous times.
A. R. Neff bought Cage's Los
Angeles Submarine Boat Company in
1915 and continued to promote his system after the end of World War I.
A. R. Neff (who had been Lake's
Washington agent) acquired the
Cage patents between January and July of 1915. CNO Benson forwarded
plans and specifications for a Neff conversion of USS G-1 in December
of 1915. Letters were prepared for the Secretary of the Navy to
request money from Congress, hence its inclusion in the big 1916
program.
The Navy objected that the exhaust
from the diesel engines
running submerged would surely leave an extremely visible churned-up
wake and that it was impractical to compress the exhaust to stow it on
board. Neff eventually proposed to use the diesels only for high
speed; at lower speeds, the boat would run on compressed air. High-
speed underwater endurance would far exceed that offered by
conventional batteries because the fuel contributed so much energy.
Compressed air could not store as much energy as chemicals in a
battery, however, at five knots, Neff managed only half the endurance
of an S-boat. In tests using submarine USS N-2, The Bureau of
Engineering found that diesels running underwater were quite noisy.
Rejecting Neff in 1922, the General Board argued that batteries and
motors had so much scope for development that they might well exceed
anything he could achieve with internal combustion engines. |
