MEETING THE DEMANDS OF THE COMMERCIAL AEROSPACE MARKET VERIFICATION TESTING AND PRODUCT QUALIFICATION AT A NEW BATTERY MANUFACTURING FACILITY

摘要

In an effort to meet the demands of the growing commercial aerospace market, Eagle-Picher Ind. (EPI) has created a commercial cell and battery manufacturing plant, the Range Line Facility (RLF). This plant, originally designed for high volume Nickel-Iron battery manufacturing, was converted three years ago to provide a commercial Nickel-Hydrogen (NiH_2) product. Because of the high reliability requirements still necessary for commercial aerospace products, the ' conversion of RLF resulted in the generation of large amounts of technical data in order to qualify new processes and designs. Much of the initial work involved matrix type testing were several variables, such as plaque porosity and thickness or electrolyte concentration, were varied in order to select the right design or to better characterize a process. Also lending to the diversity of the data generated was the fact that the first three flight programs to use this facility were all of different designs:(1) 10 inch diameter, 50 AH Single Pressure Vessel (SPV) Battery(2) 4.5 inch diameter, 120 AH Independent Pressure Vessel (IPV) Cell(3) 3.5 inch diameter, 64 AH IPV Cell.The purpose of this paper is to bring some of this data together and present some of trends observed over the past three years.