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
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
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