This Drone Battery for Submarines Drinks Seawater

This Drone Battery for Submarines Drinks Seawater





As Boeing and others work to advance underwater drones, those drones will need better batteries. MIT spinout Open Water Power (OWP) has developed and aluminum-water power system that's safer and more durable that current drone batteries, and on top of that gives underwater drones a tenfold increase in range over traditional lithium-ion.
OWP built a system out of alloyed aluminum, a cathode alloyed with a combination of elements, primarily nickel, and an alkaline electrolyte that's positioned between the electrodes. Underwater drones generally need larger batteries than airborne ones, to the extent that it's not practical to ship lithium-ion batteries of that size because of the chance that they'll catch fire—not that it would last long underwater, but long enough to destroy the battery. There's no such risk with this cathode, which draws its power from the very seawater in which it will sit.
Once the drone is in the ocean, seawater is pulled into the battery. The cathode splits the sea water into hydroxide anions and hydrogen gas, which releases electrodes. Those electrodes circle back to the cathode, giving energy to a circuit which starts the process over again. The anions and hydrogen are thrown back into the ocean, harmless. The aluminum will eventually corrode but can be replaced cheaply.
"Our power system can drink seawater and discard waste products," says co-inventor Ian Salmon McKay in a statement released by MIT. "But that exhaust is not harmful, compared to exhaust of terrestrial engines."
The aluminum-based approach could offer underwater drones more mobility in how they launch. Like Boeing's Echo Voyager, the engine itself require no service ships watching its every move. While there certainly could be military application for such an engine, McKay is looking more at search-and-rescue missions, like the 2014 Malaysia Airlines crash.
"In looking for the debris, a sizable amount of the power budget for missions like that is used descending to depth and ascending back to the surface, so their working time on the sea floor is very limited," he says. "Our power system will improve on that."

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