New at Jadoo!

Well folks: I have now left UltraCell and moved on to Jadoo as the new CTO. Jadoo has great potential in the CleanTech space, with products in the solar thermal, solar PV and hydrogen storage and PEM markets. Take a peek at www.jadoopower.com and I'll posting updates as things progress.

XX55 and new fuel!

Well, it's been quite a while since I posted and I think we're due for an update. One of the things you might have noticed is that our new XX55 is generating a lot of buzz and most importantly we are starting to move it from the lab into production in our Dayton, OH facility. You can check out our updates here: http://www.ultracellpower.com/sp.php?releases

Another piece of exciting news is that we are launching a brand new fuel cartridge. This 550cc cartridge is sized so you can get full power out of an XX25 for a 24-hr mission, and it is very lightweight. This boosts our 3-day energy density to over 500whr/kg.



Looks like 2010 is off to a good start. Stay tuned for more fuel cartridge news. We've also started working on an open standard fuel cartridge design called the CliC-it (Compact, Lightweight, Intelligen Cartridge for Interroperable Transport) which we will offer to the US Army as a way of simplifying the logistics of fuel deployment.

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The XX25 Achieves TRL7: A first for portable military fuel cells.

We were very excited to hear about this good news, because it is a first in the portable military fuel cell world!

Then, after the excitement died down, I got to wondering: "why exactly am I excited and what does TRL7 mean?"

Well, it turns out that the answer to this question is more complex than I thought. So, first of all, lets review what does TRL mean. TRL stands for Technology Readiness Level, and is a scale for measuring how close to battle proven a military technology rates. The TRL scale is typically 1-9 where 9 represents battle/mission tested, and 1 represents an idea. The figure to the right shows a graphical view of the NASA scale.

The full US Army Definitions can be found at http://www.peosoldier.army.mil/spi/trl.asp .

The US Army classifies TRL7 as "Prototype near, or at, planned operational system. Represents a major step up from TRL 6, requiring demonstration of an actual system prototype in an operational environment such as an aircraft, vehicle, or space. Examples include testing the prototype in a test bed aircraft."

Since the XX25 recently conducted successful field testing, as well as Mil Spec testing late last year, TRL7 seems to be a good status for the XX25.

So back to my original question: "why should I be excited about TRL7?" I think answer is that we're successfully transitioning a unique and rugged fuel cell to market, and that this product has a well defined role to fill: and it doesn't take a fuel cell engineer long to realize that this means a whole lot more than a TRL rating!

The next challenge for us is to achieve smooth manufacturing transition, and as you may know, we started on that challenge last year when we opened our manufacturing facility in Dayton, OH. I'll spend some time in my next post to update you on the exciting work we're doing in Dayton.

Award Winning Technology

Our whole engineering team has been working real hard for the past years, and its aways gratifying to get good reviews from people who agree with us. So, the recent award for the "Best Soldier System Innovation & Technology" Award sure felt good!

This award helps to validate our goal of delivering one of the first high performance, rugged and commercially viable fuel cell products to the US Army.

One of our design philosophies from the get go was to make the fuel cell as small as possible so that the system retained its compactness, even when people started adding accessories, carrying cases and all the other stuff that people seem to need.

When combined with hybrid batteries, extended runtime fuel tanks (AKA the Wine Box), carrying cases, various cables etc, the XX25 transforms itself into a versatile power supply.

So, we'll enjoy this award for now. But we've also got lots of other exciting news coming soon, from field testing to high TRL levels, to manufacturing ramps. So stay tuned.

Ian

XX25 undergoing Mil Spec testing

Those of you familiar with fuel cells know that these emerging products are still under development and are not available at your corner electronics shop, so we here at UltraCell have been working hard, to make our product as rugged and robust as possible to meet the needs of the US Military and convince people otherwise. A wise man once told me that if your product works for the US military, it will work for anyone.

Achieving mil spec qualification as a great way to further improve any product.

I thought you might get a kick out of our XX25 being run through some of the roughest and toughest tests out there. After all, its not every day you get to see a fuel cell kicked around. I'm also sure you can imagine how "thrilled" our engineers felt as we commenced the tests. The sounds our camera man made convey the feelings we all had as we watched our fuel cell dropped 26-times from 4-feet.


You might think that shock and vibration tests are challenging but those turned out to be trivial. Now imagine trying to get any device, cell phone to tank, to run in a 40mph sand-storm! The Mil Spec sand test simulates just this nefarious situation.


Finally, the dust test was by far my favorite, especially the noises our intrepid camera man made as he struggled to shoot the test with all that Mil Spec talcum powder flying around. This test is designed to stress the filtration systems and simulate operation in severe dust storms, and it causes grief for all types of equipment from laptops to helicopters.

This test also cost me a couple of hundred bucks because I lost the bet with the engineering team: I though we would fail, they knew we would pass and I had to buy lunch for the whole group. This is one case of sour grapes I was more than happy to pass on!


I be posting some more interesting Mil Spec tests in the near future, so stay tuned.

-Ian