In 1770 James Watt came up with the idea of using screw propellers attached to his steam engines to propel boats. Six years later David Bushnell made the concept reality and boats have been wasting 50% of their propulsion energy ever since!

Not that there haven't been improvements. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s every Navy worth their salt was putting money into test tanks and high-speed cameras, trying to understand the complex physics behind the simple shapes. Some wanted to figure out where all that wasted power was going but most were trying to solve less commercially significant problems like how to avoid detection with sonar. With over 230 years of development and millions to billions of R&D dollars having been spent, is it realistic to think Glacier Bay can come up with a better way to get propulsion energy productively into the water?

Evidence all around us indicates that the answer is YES. Mathematical models tell us how to make airplanes fly and turbines spin but are unable to explain many of the finer points that dramatically impact efficiency. To solve those complex problems, researchers in the early 1980s enrolled computers, and the science of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) was born. While the promise was there, the hardware simply wasn't up to the job and CFD remained very limited in its ability to solve practical problems until very recently. Now that's changing and it seems like everything that moves is being improved with CFD. So how much room for improvement is there in a marine propulsion system? MIT, Woods Hole, Sussex University and others have recently achieved efficiencies up to 85% in test prototypes. That is a 70% improvement over today's typical propeller.

Of course, demonstrating success in prototypes is only the first step. It can be a long way to achieve commercial viability. Fortunately, in this case, one of the major commercial stumbling blocks makes the new technologies a natural fit for Glacier Bay. It turns out that these advanced marine propulsion systems can't be easily powered from diesel engines in the conventional way via direct connection through a drive shaft. To operate at their best, they need to be connected to a highly controlled electric power source. In short, they need Glacier Bay's OSSA Powerlite® technology.

Super-efficient, super reliable, super quiet marine propulsion — courtesy of Glacier Bay.