Development study of an air independent fuel cell system for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)

The paper is focused on the design concept of a fuel cell system for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) developed within a common project of the German Navy research institute WTD 71, Fraunhofer ICT and the norwegian defense research institute ""Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt (FFI)"". The presented work is therefore based on the boundary conditions for the system defined in this project. However, a more general approach is pursued by not only presenting the developed fuel cell system, but by defining a design strategy and applying it to the framework of the development in the project. For this, constraints and objectives which define the development will be defined as boundary conditions. Most of these boundary conditions also apply to the general development of air independent underwater systems and can therefore be used to outline similar systems. Based on the literature and the constraints, system and subsystem solutions for fuel cell systems are discussed to find the most suiting system for the AUV. The different system solutions are discussed on the basis of different objectives for the system design, namely space, runtime, stability and efficiency.