New Reserve Batteries for Electronic Fuzing

Reserve battery technology for munition fuzes has hardly changed in the past 20 years.Existing reserve batteries such as thermal batteries and lithium oxyhalide chemistries have met the requirements of long shelf life, and ability to operate under harsh conditions and large acceleration and spin forces.However, new fuze battery technologies are needed to meet the extended range, precision guided, and next generation artillery fuze power requirements. Furthermore, improvements are needed for low temperature operation where lithium oxyhalide batteries suffer from slow rise times after activation. Prior to the development of lithium oxyhalide reserve batteries, chemistries based on liquid ammonia as an electrolyte solvent were used. These cells demonstrated excellent low temperature performance due to the high conductivity and low viscosity of ammonia.However, previous cells using liquid ammonia possessed working voltages 3V over the entire operating temperature range (-45 to +145 F) and high discharge rates and rapid activation time at low temperatures, while meeting or exceeding the energy and power density of existing lithium oxyhalide reserve batteries.