Development of State-of Charge Technology for Zn/Air Battery Systems

Global Technology Connection with our partners (University of Idaho and Electric Fuel Battery Corporation) proposes the development and integration of an accurate low power microcontroller based state of charge (SOC) indicator technology for Zinc/Air battery systems. Phase I effort will concentrate on the 8180 Zinc/Air battery system to: 1) characterize and model the Zinc/Air battery using existing data and appropriate testing to more effectively account for environmental / design factors beyond discharge profile that influence SOC; 2) design an appropriate SOC hardware platform on which to code by trade-off analysis of the platform’s features, functionality and ability to be transitioned to the targeted battery systems; 3) develop fuzzy neural network based SOC algorithms and prototype it along with other SOC algorithms to select the best SOC algorithm(s); 4) determine the feasibility of this SOC technology design as to its accuracy, cost, size, energy consumption, computational burden, and memory requirements. The outline of a technology roadmap and plans for development of the SOC technology system along with a Phase II work agenda to suggest program continuity and extension to other Zinc / Air batteries (12V to 24V, 15Ah to 30Ah) will be provided. Phase II will capitalize upon the findings of Phase I research and will proceed to build the finalized design and demonstrate one lot of prototype SOC devices for Zinc / Air batteries suitable for advanced laboratory and supervised field-testing. A detailed test plan for software / hardware certification and validation will be developed and implemented to evaluate the accuracy off the SOC indicator with Zinc / Air batteries at various states of charge and under various environmental and storage conditions. Several prototype SOC indication units for Marine Corps testing will be delivered and will provide interaction as needed during Marine Corps advanced laboratory testing and limited field-testing of the packaged prototype units. Phase III will encompass final optimization of the prototype SOC system and Preparation of manufacturing and marketing plans to sell this product to the government as well as the private sector.