A Safe High Energy Density Power Source for Undersea Applications

U.S. Naval operations, like other U.S. military operations, have come to depend more and more on manned and unmanned vehicles to carry out missions, including missions such as ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, inspection/identification, oceanography, communication, payload delivery, information operations and time critical strikes. These mission capabilities are essential to help our naval forces maintain maritime superiority around the world. However, in the case of submersibles (such as Swimmer Delivery Vehicle (SDS wet), Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS dry), future Shallow Water Combat Submersible (SWCS wet) and Shallow Water Surveillance System (SWSS)), the operation duration and transit distance are often limited by the energy storage capacity of their power systems. Current technologies used by the military for high energy density applications such as submersibles include Li primary batteries (e.g. LiSOCl2 ~500WH/kg, or Li-CFx-MnO2), Silver Zinc batteries (140-200 WH/kg), and Li-ion secondary batteries (180-220 WH/kg). However, these three battery chemistries do not fully meet operational requirements and have relatively high costs.In this SBIR program, a novel high energy density seawater battery is proposed and will be developed to meet this urgent demand from the U.S. Navy.