Extremely Lightweight Fuel Cell Based Power Supply System for Commercial Aircrafts

Fuceltech proposes to develop a low cost lightweight Energy Storage and Power Generation (ESPG) system for commercial aircrafts in the ARPA-E REEACH program. Fuceltech will develop a single fuel cell (5kW to be developed in the program and potentially as high as 10kW from a single cell) and a novel stacking approach which can be used to deliver hundreds of kW or MWs of power from a single small and lightweight stack. Fuceltech has built prototypes in the past with a variant of the approach which lacked the stacking ability. In this SBIR, Fuceltech intends to develop and demonstrate high power single cell and their stacking ability. We would will use ethanol as a fuel and a reformer for reforming the fuel. Precision Combustion Inc(PCI), which is a technology leader in the field of reformers will build the reformer for this fuel. We have decided to use ethanol as the fuel as it would deliver low CO concentration in the reformate. PCI has done experimentation with ethanol in the past and in this program will build a low cost and lightweight reformer for ethanol for the PEM fuel cells for ARPA-E demonstration. We would develop single cells of 2kW power in phase 1 and demonstrate stacked cells of >5kW output power and in phase 2 will develop 5kW single cells and demonstrate stacks of 5 and 10kW output power. Fuceltech team has a strong commercialization background and will aggressively commercialize the technology and products after the development in the SBIR.