Abstract
Investigation, conservation, and exploitation of seas require platforms capable of accomplishing a wide variety of missions in harsh environments with restricted human intervention for long periods of time. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are excellent tools for carrying out these missions due to their versatility and ability to access remote sites. However, despite the improvement of their capabilities, their development is not devoid of challenges. Endurance, among others, such as underwater communications or autonomy, is still a pending subject. Current battery-based solutions do not offer sufficient endurance and innovative power plants with higher energy content are needed. This work studies the advantages, in terms of endurance, of using a power plant based on Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFCs) to power AUVs. In order to accomplish this, a multi-objective optimization tool that makes use of a genetic algorithm was developed. This tool allows quick preliminary design of AUVs with a DMFC-based power plant, complying with a user-defined payload, operation profile, and restrictions. Six designs based on a real AUV model were studied, and endurance values up to 2 times longer than the corresponding reference AUV were obtained. These results support the benefits of using DMFCs to power AUVs to increase their endurance.
Highlights
The importance of oceans and seas is and has always been vital for human beings
Since the SPURV [2], the first Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) built by the University of Washington (USA) in 1957, these vehicles have evolved in a way that enable them to perform complex missions, for example, search and intervention in pipelines laying on the seabed with no human intervention [3,4]
After calculating the power to be delivered by the fuel cells, Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFCs)-AUV\QpDM searches the database for a whole number of stacks that can meet the demand and selects the highest efficiency solution
Summary
The importance of oceans and seas is and has always been vital for human beings. They contribute to weather regulation, CO2 capture, and O2 production; constitute a rich source of food and raw materials; have been fundamental for communication and trading for many centuries; and have been the scene of military conflicts. The Naval Undersea Warfare Center of the US Navy proposed on-board diesel-oil reforming to feed a SOFC [12] This solution solves the energy storage problem, but it must be noted that the reforming process presents a series of drawbacks that hinder its application on-board AUVs. For example, the high running temperature of the reformer, approximately 873 K in the cited work; the need for a scrubber to filter impurities that can reduce the fuel cell performance; or the slow system response to power demand changes. These vehicles were selected because detailed information about their payload is publicly accessible [6], and both the HUGIN 3000 and the HUGIN are some of the commercially available AUVs with the longest declared endurance These vehicles belong to the same family with similar operational characteristics, but their maximum operation depth and size vary, which allows checking the impact of the size in the performance of the proposed power plant. Lithium Polymer pressure tolerant battery h @ 4 knots (with MBE, SSS, SBP and CTD)
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