Pressure-Tolerant Batteries for Autonomous Undersea Applications
Abstract
High performance power sources constitute a critical technology for our core business -- developing and building autonomous underwater vehicles. As these vehicles reach new levels of autonomy and reliability, and as their areas of application expand, the demand for improved energy supply grows continually. Using emerging Advanced Lithium Battery technology, Bluefin set out to advance the state of the art in subsea energy storage in the following areas: (a) Energy density with respect to weight and volume, including all housings, cabling, and support electronics and at temperatures typical of the sub sea environment; (b) Safety , user friendliness, and robustness in handling, operation, storage and shipping, charging (c) AUV design freedom and scalability to high energy requirements, no restrictions on vehicle attitude in operation etc.; (d) Ultimate life and life time cost of batteries. Our goal was to build a practical, high performance battery at a reasonable level of technical risk, for use in our own vehicles, as well as for sale to other subsea industries. The longer term goals include expanding into other markets, as well as continual technical advances that exploit the expected improvements in price, performance and safety of these cells. Consumer applications for these cells will drive availability up, price down, and performance ever closer to the theoretical limits in the years ahead.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA626875
Entities
People
- J. S. Willcox
- Knut Streitlien