If you’re a soldier doing reconnaissance in enemy territory, you’ve got
a lot of problems. Taking fire, staying invisible, and enduring the
elements are obvious. Battery life is a little less so. The idea that
propane is a solution to these woes? That sounds crazy.
And yet, battery life remains an increasingly cumbersome struggle that the military faces. As American soldiers become increasingly reliant on technology, they demand more power sources. One dependable option is the standard Ultralife UBI-2590 battery,
pictured below. Weighing over three pounds a piece, these brick-sized
devices can power anything from a radio to an antenna to a smartphone.
But since the batteries have a limited capacity, soldiers need more than
just one for a mission. They might need a few dozen. After all, there
aren’t many wall outlets for recharging in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Enter DARPA. With the support of DARPA’s Trans App program,
a team of engineers from Ultra Electronics built a lightweight,
350-watt propane generator that’s capable of charging in batteries in
the field. It’s also practically silent. At a recent DARPA demo day the
team showed me the invention, which isn’t much bigger than a duffel bag.
I had to ask if it was running. (It was.)
At first, a
propane-powered generator might not seem like such a game-changing
innovation. But consider our recon soldiers camped out in far flung
locations, transmitting potentially life-saving intelligence while
struggling to evade detection. Once they’re out of battery power, the
soldiers can’t do their job. Firing up a gasoline-powered generator
would give away their position, and dropping more batteries into the
area risks lives. So these soldiers lug in as many charged batteries as
they think they’ll need—sometimes adding nearly a hundred pounds to
their already heavy load of gear.
Propane is
not nearly as heavy as lithium ion battery cells. Thanks to the
impossibly quiet new DARPA-funded generator, soldiers can carry in a few
batteries and recharge them on the fly. To give you an idea of how much
weight this new invention can save, check out the illustration below.
On the left are 100 UBI-2590 batteries. On the right is the equivalent
amount of gear a soldier would need to generate the same amount of power
on a mission:
Bear in
mind the simple, brutal fact that each of those 100 batteries weighs
over three pounds. The propane generator weighs just 11 pounds, and the
tank weighs an extra 20. Smaller four-pound tanks work just as well.
Effectively, DARPA wants to replace dozens of pounds of gear in a
soldier’s pack with just a few pounds of propane. It sounds like an
ambitious but simple goal, one that could save lives. Now if they could
juuuuuuuuust figure out how to turn fatigues into a giant solar cell,
nobody would have to carry any power sources at all.
Images by Adam Clark Estes
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