Integrated Power Generation for Small Unmanned Vehicles

The ever increasing utilization of unmanned air, ground and maritime vehicles has dictated the need for the DoD to more effectively integrate the generation of electrical power with the propulsion engine associated with unmanned vehicles. This issue applies equally to turbine and IC engines. The problem could be considered more vexing in the case of small turbine engines since the maturity of this integration is at a much lower level than an IC engine counterpart. Military assets that could immediately incorporate Spytek’s proposed ITB/generator technology are the Global Hawk and other small UAV’s of similar mission requirements which have increasingly greater electrical power demands, but largely on an intermittent basis i.e., electronic warfare attacks. The integration of a generator and an Inter-Turbine-Burner (ITB) between the gas generator turbine and an electrical generator turbine could meet this warfighter demand. Leveraging its previous AFRL sponsored work on Ultra-Compact Combustors and inter-turbine burners, Spytek Aerospace proposes to design and build a fully integrated ITB/generator module mounted to one of its existing gas turbine engine designs.