We caught up with Mr. Jonathan Douglas-Smith, Aerospace Business Development Manager for Intelligent Energy to learn more about their product. Intelligent energy is manufacturer of hydrogen fuel cells, typically for UAV’s. The “IE-SOAR” product line, for example, allows an operator to extends the flight times of UAV’s by three to five times over state of the art batteries. Additional benefits include long lifespan, zero maintenance, and zero emissions at point of use.
The gaseous hydrogen is stored in the cylinder at high pressure, 300 bar 4500psi. They are agnostic to the fuel source, in that they have customers flying on liquid hydrogen, and that’s another ten times of flight time over batteries. When asked about where Intelligent Energy sees the utilization of this technology, Mr. Douglas-Smith stated “we’re selling our fuel stop products to UAV manufacturers, and those end customers are using the long endurance hydrogen fuel cell priority for long-linear asset inspection work, such as transmission lines and pipelines”.
In the USA, their customers are obtaining BVLOS waivers to fly fuel cell drones, just like the one on the display stand, to do those long inspection routes, up to 100 miles a day. The commercial traction has never been higher, particularly in the parcel delivery and civilian market, where the need to carry those packages for longer distances is a key requirement of the industry. So that aspect is receiving a huge amount of growth Intelligent Energy. If a package delivery company is setting up its distribution centers to pick up packages and carry them longer distances, the [potential] higher efficiency is that they’d need fewer distribution centers over a certain area when flying on these fuel cells.
The fuel cell the cylinder is quickly recharged. Hydrogen is filled into the cylinder after a few minutes compared to batteries that can take at least half an hour to recharge. In terms of handling requirements, for folks that are in the process of maintaining refueling and so forth, what the consumer or drone builder needs to know to be able to utilize this technology, Intelligent Energy has spent three years working on making it simple to use. Mr. Douglas-Smith stated that they tried to make it as plug and play as possible, and for lack of a better term “idiot proof”. Mr. Douglas-Smith stated that “if any operator were to not pay attention for any period of time there's always a safety mechanism in place to stop the hydrogen overfilling, or for a connector to be loose, so no hydrogen will be leaked that is in the danger zone”.
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