As drones continue to reshape the nature of warfare, the limitations on range and power are becoming the difference between success and defeat on the battlefield. Now, an Israel-based drone company and U.S. manufacturing company Mach Industries are working together to co-produce hydrogen fuel cell powered drones, which offer big advantages in range but have previously faced challenges that have kept them from the battlefield.
The companies hope to produce 1,000 drones each month, with an eventual goal of up to 1,000 a day, HevenDrones CEO Benzion Levinson told Defense One. The longer-range goal will depend on the demand for the company’s H2D250 drones, which are capable of carrying 10 pounds, and its other offerings.
There’s also potential to increase the drones’ size in the future. “Once you have the scale blueprint and include a lot of automations, it really then becomes a function of how big you want to go and how fast you want to scale,” Levinson said.
Hydrogen fuel cell powered drone experimentation goes back decades in the United States, beginning with NASA’s 1994 Helios prototype. The Office of Naval Research has also invested in related research and experimentation.
Hydrogen fuel cells offer big advantages over conventional lithium-ion batteries for drones, particularly for defense purposes, said Seyed Hosseini, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Arkansas Tech University. His lab has conducted experiments showing that hydrogen-powered drones can fly three to five times longer than conventional drones, “meaning they can collect, analyze, and act on data over longer missions without recharge (refueling).”
A longer range plus more on-board power to run advanced autonomy software on the drones itself reduces the need for a human operator to send instructions via communication channels that are vulnerable to electromagnetic warfare attack.
Increased autonomy, including experiments with GPS-independent navigation, are a big focus for Heven, Levinson said, driven in part by the company’s experience helping Israeli forces against Hezbollah factions armed with Russian electromagnetic warfare capabilities.
Samuel Bendett of the Center for Naval Analysis, an expert on Ukraine and Russia’s use of drones, told Defense One: “The farther your drone can fly, the greater the chances of disrupting adversary logistics and supply lines, and hitting command and control facilities located farther behind from the line of contact.”
That’s one reason the Russia-Ukraine war has become a sort of living lab in which both sides are constantly developing new drone types to best one another. “Both sides are pushing the range limits on their radio-controlled drones—via signal repeaters and fiber-optic drones via larger fiber optic spools,” Bendett said.
As the United States military explores options for conducting operations over vast distances in the Pacific, fiber optic drones aren’t really feasible, and the short-duration drones at play in Ukraine aren’t suitable either. Drones with internal combustion engines can fly longer, but also have a thermal signature that makes them easy to spot and intercept. That signature is much smaller in drones using hydrogen-fuel cell batteries to power electric motors.
“We have a tank of hydrogen, a small amount, about one pound of hydrogen, and this is going into a fuel cell, which is creating electricity,” Levinson said. “We’re getting about 10 hours of flight time, about 100 miles.”
HevenDrones has also developed hydrogen refueling stations that can be deployed to remote island bases, reducing the need to rely on vulnerable resupply lines, he said. “Wherever you are, if you’re Marines and you have this, you’re taking this with you, right? You can create hydrogen 24/7, from essentially thin air.”
But there are other challenges inhibiting wide U.S. adoption of hydrogen fuel-cell drones, Hosseini said. The big one is the supply chain for materials and parts, which is heavily dominated by China.
“The U.S. still relies on China for critical materials [rare-earth metals, carbon fiber, lithium-ion batteries, and some electronics]. A geopolitical conflict with China could disrupt the hydrogen-based drone supply chain, limiting defense applications. Investments in domestic supply chains are needed to reduce reliance on Chinese imports and secure military drone production,” he said.
Those concerns speak to one of the goals of the new partnership between HevenDrones and Mach: to further develop a U.S.-based supply chain of drones as well as sub-systems and other critical parts. “We really have a focus on unavailability of supply chain, supply chain control, and on the pricing,” said Levinson. “That is the core aspect of what we’re doing together.”
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