Self Regulating Fiber Fuel Cell

Advances in lithium primary battery technology, which serves as the gold standard power source for the dismounted soldier, have not kept pace with the ever increasing power and energy requirements of modern military electronic equipment. Fuel cells have long been touted as the solution to the dismounted soldiers power and energy problems, but until recently, have largely failed to live up to that promise. There is still a pressing need for better power sources at the Watt or sub-Watt level, especially in applications requiring non-traditional form factors thin, prismatic or those having special requirements like flexibility or conformability, where existing battery technology falls short. To address these needs, Honeywell has developed and demonstrated a revolutionary new power source in the form of a Self Regulating Fiber Fuel Cell, which utilizes a novel fuel chemistry, regulation mechanism and micro fabrication techniques to create a flexible, conformal power source with significantly better energy density and specific energy compared to state of the art lithium primary batteries. We have met all program objectives by demonstrating a 5mm diameter 50mm length fiber fuel cell with 93mW peak power, an energy density of 1027 Whrliter and a specific energy of 1800Whrkg, which corresponds to 7.4X and 15.4X the Solicore LiPo battery, respectively. We have demonstrated a fiber with bend radius of 2-3mm which should enable weaving into a flexible and conformal mesh. We believe further performance improvements are possible through optimizing the fiber design.