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, in this SBIR program, a novel high selectivity, high efficient oxygen separation technology is proposed. Preliminary analysis suggests that Enogetek¡¯s oxygen extraction and storage technology has the following advantages, 1) low cost; 2) low power consumption; 3) high oxygen flux and 4) robust and compact. Therefore, once developed, it could exceed the requirement of this solicitation.