Royal Navy Type 26 frigates to sport James Fisher monitoring system

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has selected James Fisher Mimic’s (JFM) Condition Monitoring System to maintain the UK Royal Navy’s future Type 26 frigate fleet.

Having used condition-based maintenance (CBM) for many years, the UK Royal Navy will adopt Mimic to capture, connect, and combine all vessel data.

This is expected to provide actionable insights into the health and performance of machinery on the Type 26 frigates, anywhere and any time, thus improving reliability, increasing uptime, enhancing safety, and saving money, JFM said.

In November last year, JFM officially handed over the enhanced version of its Mimic 4 software to meet the MoD’s contractual requirements, completing phase one of the software installation project.

The next phases will see the testing, implementation and rollout of the software across the fleet by the end of this year.

To assist in the overall maintenance of the vessels, Mimic will analyse vibration data, fluid quality, performance and efficiency, to inform a data-driven, proactive maintenance strategy.

These measurable and recordable parameters influence day-to-day operations on-board each vessel by eliminating unscheduled breakdowns, helping to reduce maintenance costs, increase operational productivity and improve safety.

“It’s a significant moment in the history of JFM and our relationship with the UK MoD. It’s a milestone that will see the Mimic Condition Monitoring Software used more extensively on-board the state-of-the-art Type 26 Frigates,” said Paul Mount, general manager at JFM.

“Because the ships being built now have an expected life of more than 25 years, our challenge was to think ahead and provide a condition monitoring solution to fulfill future requirements, and what followed was a period of development to enhance the Mimic Condition Monitoring software to ensure it would fulfill those specific requirements, and satisfy the condition monitoring demands of future warships.”

The UK programme to develop the Type 26 Global Combat Ship for the Royal Navy is well underway with the first Type 26 HMS GLASGOW to be delivered in the mid-2020s.