High Performance Lithium-Ion Battery Power System
A new high performance lithium-ion battery power system that endures deep sea operations.
Project leader
Dr Cheng Siong Chin
Professor Ehsan Mesbahi
Dr Junbo Jia
Dates
April 2013 - April 2016
Sponsors
Singapore Maritime Institute (SMI)
Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA)
Partners
Clean Energy Research Centre at Singapore’s Temasek Polytechnic
Soil Machine Dynamics (SMD) Ltd
Description
Electric-propelled underwater robotic vehicles (URVs) are manned, remotely-operated and autonomous. They have various deep water applications.
They inspect and report any damages to offshore oil rig platforms. This makes them more relevant to the marine industry.
URVs enable continuous real-time monitoring in a timely and more effective manner in deep water. Especially places where human divers are unable to reach.
In the past two decades, these robotic systems have become more prevalent and reliable and used in harsh and remote environments.
Requirements placed on the battery and power systems are more stringent and demanding. They need more power and endurance. The batteries must be robust.
This allows them to cope with a wider range of environmental conditions. This is especially true of batteries for URVs. But the endurance for the power system is limited by the power source capacity.
This project developed a new high performance lithium-ion battery power system. Designed for use in long endurance deep sea operations.
The project aimed to design and develop an intelligent, self-learning battery management system. This increases battery life by 25% whilst delivering higher power capacity.
The batteries function up to 3,000m below the surface. This permits subsea operations for longer and with more efficiency.
The technology applies to the following:
- Underwater robotic vehicles
- Offshore oil rig platform monitoring
- Deep ocean surveys in preparation for oil fields,
- Subsea systems inspection
- Maritime energy storage systems
- Environmental surveying
Soil Machine Dynamics aid the research by providing a real life application for the system. They conduct trials on their deep water subsea vehicle systems.