NEW ORLEANS — Atop craggy hills in Afghanistan, soldiers manning remote observation posts are currently using fuel cells to power their lights, radios and other electronic devices.
“This is the ideal scenario for fuel cell use,” said Michael Dominick of the Army’s Communications-Electronics, Research, Development and Engineering Center.
“This is not an exercise or demonstration. These fuel cells are actually being used in theater.”
This news comes as the Obama administration announced plans to spend $20 million of Recovery Act funding on military fuel cell technology. The Defense Department’s director of defense research and engineering (DDR&E) office will be spearheading these efforts.
For years, technologists have been touting the potential of fuel cell use in the military as the number of devices requiring battery power has proliferated.
Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that combine hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity. The oxygen comes from the air, but the hydrogen must come from a second source — most often fossil fuels. They can be small enough to power electronic devices worn by troops, or large enough to power camps not connected to an electrical grid.
They have faced several hurdles, though. JP8, which is the military’s fuel of choice, doesn’t work well as a source of hydrogen. The technology is relatively new and not widely used. And the devices on the market need to be ruggedized for the military.
Many of these issues are spelled out in a fuel cell technology roadmap that is being published this month by the joint defense manufacturing technology panel’s power sources technical working group, which comprises members of all four services and the Defense Logistics Agency.
A renewed focus on the war in Afghanistan may push the technology into widespread use as war fighters require more power for longer missions. Remote outposts, where everything must be backpacked in, and soldiers remain for days at a time, spurred an order under the Rapid Fielding Initiative to deliver the technology, Dominick said at the National Defense Industrial Association Power Expo here.
“We feel this is a very significant event since this is a real mission application,” he said.
Authors of the fuel cell roadmap see the Recovery Act funding efforts as a potential breakthrough.
“There is a customer pull on this. And if the technology is successful, they will buy” fuel cells, said Marc Gietter, a project leader in the CERDEC Army power division, in an interview. “The time has come for the small fuel cell to make its debut into the Army inventory,” he added.
Fuel cells could potentially solve one of the major battlefield energy problems, their proponents have said. The weight foot soldiers or marines must bear has increased along with the number of electronic devices they must carry. Fuel cells may offer a solution.
For short missions, standard issue batteries may suffice. In Iraq, war fighters on patrol do not typically leave for long periods. They can take rechargeable or disposable batteries along and return to their home base in time to be resupplied. But that may not be the case in Afghanistan, where roads are poor and patrols can last for days.
Adele Ratcliff, of the office of the secretary of defense’s manufacturing technology (Mantech) program, said the $20 million comes on top of an additional $49 million Department of Energy fuel cell manufacturing technology initiative.
The office “never has put out that much money for a single alternative energy program,” she added.
The initiative will include funds to purchase hundreds of wearable fuel cells and larger man-portable systems that can be carried into the field to supply power to squads.
The first broad agency announcement on a tactical level fuel cell system should come out in late July, Gietter said. This program will receive the bulk of the fuel cell stimulus funds. It will seek a man-portable system that can be carried into areas where there is no electrical grid. It would be used to recharge batteries and supply power for these small units in remote locations.
The idea is to boost the manufacturing base, he said. The more units that are produced, the more dependable they will become. And the more robust the supply chain becomes, the cheaper it will be for the military to buy the fuel cells, he said.
Ratcliff said: “I think this says a lot for where the department is headed. It’s not just a fading topic du jour. It shows a large commitment at the senior level of where we need to go.”
Gietter said the fuel cell technology roadmap, which is now in its final draft, will speak to the need to boost the manufacturing base. Fuel cells need to be more dependable, he said. One way to do that is to manufacture them in large numbers so engineers can obtain a better idea of what their shortcomings are.
Ratcliff said: “Many of the reasons why you don’t have the technology … is because you can’t stabilize the manufacturing processes to make them affordable enough to create market penetration.”
The main challenges the roadmap spells out are: ruggedization for the military environment; slow warm up times; and reliability — or the time between failures, said Frank Sokolowski, an industrial engineer at the Defense Contract Management Agency’s industrial analysis center, and a co-author of the roadmap.
“You have to build a lot of them to get them reliable,” he said. There is precedence in the military energy field. Lithium ion batteries began as a military application. But it wasn’t until the technology was adopted by the commercial market that the cost per unit began to drop.
“We don’t see the military by itself driving that cost down,” said Gietter.
Dismounted war fighters could use wearable fuel cells which use propane or methanol that come in cartridges as a source of hydrogen. However, this will require adding another fuel source to the battlefield. The military — in order to make life simpler for logisticians — settled on JP8 as the sole source of fuel to power its trucks, aircraft and generators. In order to pull the hydrogen from a fossil fuel, it must first pass through a catalytic reformer. But JP8 contains high amounts of sulfur. This impurity eventually clogs and “poisons” the reformer and renders it useless.
Dominick said the cell poisoning issue remains a major hurdle. There are still ongoing efforts to see if JP8 can be reformed, but a solution might be years away. For the short term, other fuels are being used. “No one fuel technology has demonstrated it will be the sole solution for the military,” he added.
Methanol, propane and ethanol are all potential sources of hydrogen. Last October, DDR&E ran a wearable power competition with a $1 million top prize for the lightest system that could provide up to 20 watts of power for 96 hours. Competitors could use either batteries, fuel cells or combinations of the two. The top three winners were all fuel cells. The first and third-place prizes used methanol and the second-place winner used propane.
Dominick said propane has one advantage because it is so widely available. The military could potentially take the fuel cells to a foreign country and then purchase propane locally.
CERDEC, in an effort to boost the industry, has awarded contracts to all the major players including UltraCell for its XX25 fuel cell and South Korea’s Samsung, which also has a methanol-based fuel cell. Adaptive Material Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., winner of the second prize in the wearable power competition, has also received some CERDEC funding.
“Many of our current systems are showing increased reliability,” Dominick said.
Along with wearable power, CERDEC sees promise in the man-portable category that DDR&E intends to invest heavily in, he said. These one-kilowatt systems can be a bridge between batteries and JP8 fueled generators, he said.
One start-up company believes it has the solution to the JP8 problem.
Global Energy Innovations has developed a fuel cell stack that it says can handle any hydrogen-based energy source without poisoning the fuel cell. It manages this by heating up the systems to 160 degrees centigrade. By doing so, it tolerates 15,000 times more impurities than low temperature fuel cells, said Eric Schmidt, the company’s business development manager.
The GEI-X-5 system separates the hydrogen from the fuel using high temperature steam. Waste water that is normally produced by this process is recycled. There are virtually no emissions, he claimed. The company has added shielding to the system to reduce the heat signature. The military normally doesn’t want to run “hot” systems in situations where the enemy can detect soldiers’ presence from heat signatures.
The one possible flaw is that the system takes 20 to 30 minutes to “warm up,” he said. GEI has corrected this by adding a lithium ion battery that can provide up to 2 kilowatts of power for 30 minutes.
GEI isn’t the only company pursuing the heated fuel cell solution. Both the Army and the Navy have recognized the promise of the technology. The Office of Naval Research conducted an industry day for high-temperature fuel cells last year.
Schmidt said the company is just now introducing the systems to the military market. It hasn’t received any contracts yet. “We’re continuously modifying, downsizing and really getting this down to a package that will benefit the user.”
As far as tapping into a commercial market, a German company, Smart Fuel Cells, has been selling the technology to European recreational vehicle enthusiasts. Christian Boehm, president of the company’s U.S. division, said the start-up is growing rapidly. It sold 16 fuel cells in 2002 to boaters and campers. By 2008, the company sold 12,200 units. In the first quarter this year, it has sold about 13,000 fuel cells. It also supplies the methanol tanks that feed the cells, he said. The system costs $3,500 for commercial systems, and the methanol containers that provide the fuel can be obtained for $20 to $30.
The company is actively pursuing the military market. Two teams from the company participated in the DDR&E wearable power challenge. A joint Smart Fuel Cells/DuPont team won first place and its Jenny wearable fuel cell took the third spot. It has demonstrated the technology for the Army, the Air Force and NATO forces, he said.
As for soldiers wearing a methanol fuel pack, Boehm said it has been thoroughly tested by the Army for safety. Methanol evaporates rapidly and has a high flash point. The Army has shot the packs with tracer ammunition and it did not ignite, he said.
While it is not for the battlefield, there is another real-world application for fuel cells in the military. The technology is being used to power forklifts at military depots.
The Pennsylvania-based Defense Distribution Depot Susquehanna in February began a pilot project where it is operating 40 fuel cell powered forklifts — 20 new models and 20 retrofitted, according to Bob Skinnell, the depot’s equipment services manager.
The depot is the largest of the 26 the Defense Logistics Agency operates. It runs 24 hours a day in three shifts, seven days a week. “We wanted to find a robust test ... there was no better place in DLA than our operation,” Skinnell said.
The depot is powering the forklifts using liquid hydrogen. There are two being tested, a larger fuel cell that can operate a forklift for an entire eight-hour shift, and smaller one that lasts about three to four hours, he said.
The $5.3 million project took about two and half years to set up, he said. A main concern was educating the union, the forklift operators and the fire department about the introduction of liquid hydrogen to the depot.
“We spent a lot of time working with those folks to get their confidence in hydrogen fuel cells.”
The local fire department didn’t have any experience working with the material. The fire codes were not fully up to date, he said. But ensuring that hydrogen fuel tanks were placed inside was crucial to having the forklift operators accept the technology.
“Indoor dispensing was a key. Operators don’t like to go out in February to refuel,” he said.
Early feedback on the system has been positive, he said. The battery-charged forklifts currently used take five to six hours to recharge. It takes about three to five minutes to refuel the new forklifts.
DLA believes that the system will pay back the cost of the fuel cells, leasing the equipment and maintaining the infrastructure, he added.
At least one commercial warehouse operator has used some of the data and applied it to a fuel cell forklift operation, he said.
“The goal here is to be an early adopter to help push the technology forward into the commercial
world,” he said.