UAVs Go Green With Fuel-Cell Powered "Ion Tiger"

Hugh Pickens writes "Increasingly, the military is deploying unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as eyes in the sky to scan the ground for targets and threats, especially for missions that are too dangerous for manned aircraft. Now Live Science reports that a new robotic spy plane called 'Ion Tiger' will harness alternative energy to make it more covert and longer lasting than battery-powered or engine-powered UAVs. A 550-watt, 0.75 horsepower hydrogen fuel cell will power the Ion Tiger with four times the efficiency of a comparable internal combustion engine and seven times the energy of the equivalent weight of batteries. When Ion Tiger took flight in October, it exceeded any demonstration of electrically powered flight so far, flying 23 hours and 17 minutes. 'And it carried a 5 lbs. payload to boot — enough to carry, say, a day-and-night camera,' says researcher Karen Swider-Lyons, head of the alternative energy section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. 'No one has come close to flying 24 hours with a significant payload before.' Another big advantage is the Ion Tiger's reduced noise, heat and emissions. 'Think about lawnmowers or chainsaws — they're really loud,' says Swider-Lyons. 'It's hard to spy on people when they know you're there, so you had to fly them at high altitudes to keep them from being heard.'"

Comments

Re:Green don't matter

[amorsen]

Wind is quite cheap actually, even compared to modern nuclear power plants -- as long as you compare actual price for e.g. the new Finnish plants instead of prices in the budget. Like other large projects, nuclear power plants have a notorious tendency to cost more than expected. Wind turbines on the other hand are off-the-shelf.

If you're trying to create hydrogen wind turbines are fairly good, but they can't beat just cracking natural gas cost-wise. You can use heat from nuclear plants directly to create hydrogen, skipping the inefficient low temperature turbines used at most nuclear power plants, but I'm not aware that this has been put into production anywhere.

Land used for wind turbines can be used for farming as well. The only limitation is that it must be possible for service personnel to reach the wind turbines. You can also put them in the sea, which while more expensive also provides a steadier supply of power, and fewer neighbours will complain. By the way, a wind turbine has been put up at the conference center where the climate conference in Copenhagen will be held. I live ~500m from it, and I expected to be able to hear it or perhaps see distracting reflections of the sunlight off the wings. So far there has been no annoyances from it at all.