A NOVEL OXYGEN SEPARATION AND STORAGE APPARATUS FOR UNDERWATER AND HIGH ALTITUDE FUEL CELL APPLICATIONS

U.S. Military operations have come to depend more and more on unmanned vehicles (unmanned undersea vehicles UUVs and unmanned air vehicles UAVs) to carry out numerous missions. However, the transit distance for many of these missions is often well limited by the energy storage capacity of their power systems. Fuel cell, particularly SOFC that can be fed directly with reformate, looks promising. Conventional oxygen supply takes up a lot of volume (up to 40%). To solve this problem, one has to figure out a way to utilize the on-site oxygen resource. To separate oxygen from water, gill-swim bladder system constitutes an ideal model. Following this principle, Enogetek and University of Cincinnati have conducted extensive investigations into solutions to those problems in the Phase I program. A novel high selectivity, high efficient oxygen separation technology is developed and demonstrated. In the phase II program, we are going to further develop the technology. By the end of the program, we expect a compact, high energy efficient oxygen separation and storage device will be developed with the following features, 1) low cost; 2) low power consumption; 3) high oxygen flux and 4) robust and compact. Therefore, once developed, it could meet the requirement of this solicitation.