A New Generation of Mobile Battlefield Power Support Systems

Mobile battlefield power support systems in use today are excessively noisy, have thermal management problems, and produce unhealthy exhaust emissions. These characteristics present serious logistic limitations in terms of the labor intensive effort required to achieve covertness and healthy, productive working conditions for the Navy personnel. This problem is expected to become more acute as more sophisticated electronic subsystems such as communications navigation, portable radar, ranging, and portable computing equipment are placed into service. In order to achieve the highest level of effectiveness that is possible with advanced technologies, the Navy has a critical need for high quality, unobstrusive power support sysstems. A program to develop a new generation of mobile battlefield power support systems meeting all the requirements specified by the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory is proposed. The proposed effort is highly leveraged against ongoing research being carried out by the proposing firm under the auspices of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). To date, InterScience, Inc. has demonstrated a 500 Watt, 1 lb permanent magnet alternator that scales readily to several kilowatts and is designed to operate with DF-2 and JP-8 burning engines that are presently being developed for the U.S. Army for use in soldier backpack power/cooling units. Based on this experience, InterScience, Inc. is intimately familiar with practical issues including noise control, exhaust emission control, thermal management, varible load condition, etc. As part of the Phase I deliverables, the existence of suitable engines and generators will be established as well as the capability of the proposing firm to implement a microporocessor-based control system including miniaturized sensors and acturators that are required to achieve clean, unobtrusive power. The design will be based on mass production technologies such that the resulting power supply modules can be produced at low cost.