If you ’re a soldier doing reconnaissance in foe territory , you ’ve vex a great deal of problems . Taking fire , staying invisible , and go the component are obvious . shelling life is a little less so . The thought that propane is a root to these woe ? That sounds crazy .
And yet , battery life remain an increasingly cumbersome struggle that the armed forces faces . As American soldiersbecome increasingly reliant on technology , they demand more power sources . One safe option isthe standard Ultralife UBI-2590 battery , pictured below . Weighing over three pounds a while , these brick - sized devices can power anything from a radio to an antenna to a smartphone . But since the batteries have a circumscribed electrical capacity , soldier require more than just one for a deputation . They might ask a few dozen . After all , there are n’t many wall outlets for recharging in the great deal of Afghanistan .
Enter DARPA . With the support ofDARPA ’s Trans App program , a squad of engineers from Ultra Electronics built a lightweight , 350 - watt propane generator that ’s capable of charging in batteries in the field . It ’s also practically silent . At a late DARPA demo daylight the squad showed me the innovation , which is n’t much bigger than a duffel udder . I had to ask if it was go . ( It was . )
At first , a propane - powered author might not seem like such a biz - change innovation . But turn over our recon soldier camp out in far flung locations , transmitting potentially spirit - saving tidings while struggling to parry detection . Once they ’re out of barrage fire power , the soldiers ca n’t do their job . Firing up a gasoline - powered generator would give away their position , and dropping more batteries into the sphere risks lives . So these soldier lug in as many institutionalise batteries as they imagine they ’ll want — sometimes add together nearly a hundred pounds to their already large load of gear .
Propane is not nearly as heavy as lithium ion battery cells . Thanks to the impossibly still fresh DARPA - funded generator , soldiers can have a bun in the oven in a few battery and recharge them on the fly . To give you an musical theme of how much weight this new invention can hold open , check out the illustration below . On the left are 100 UBI-2590 batteries . On the right is the equivalent amount of gear a soldier would need to mother the same amount of office on a missionary station :
Bear in idea the simple , brutal fact that each of those 100 battery weighs over three pounds . The propane author weighs just 11 pounds , and the armoured combat vehicle matter an extra 20 . small four - pound tank work just as well .
efficaciously , DARPA want to replace wads of pound of gear mechanism in a soldier ’s pack with just a few pounds of propane . It sounds like an challenging but simple finish , one that could spare life sentence . Now if they could juuuuuuuuust cipher out how to ferment fatigues into a elephantine solar cell , nobody would have to carry any power sources at all .
Images by Adam Clark Estes
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