GM and U.S. Army expand fuel-cell collaboration

U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development & Engineering Center engineer Thiago Olson integrates a fuel cell onto a robot at TARDEC’s Fuel Cell Research Laboratory in its recently opened Ground System Power and Energy Laboratory building in Warren, MI.

Expanding on a demonstration project in Hawaii, General Motors Co. and theU.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development & Engineering Center(TARDEC) will again collaborate on fuel-cell technology under a new cooperative research and development agreement. The new collaboration will focus on the testing of new hydrogen fuel-cell materials and designs to evaluate their performance and durability before assembling them into full-scale fuel-cell propulsion systems. Currently, TARDEC is evaluating GM fuel-cell vehicles in a Hawaii comprehensive demonstration; the technology has possible military applications ranging from ground vehicles to mobile generators. TARDEC opened a new Fuel Cell Research Laboratory in its recently opened Ground System Power and Energy Laboratory building in Warren, MI. The state-of-the-art facility enables TARDEC to test and integrate the fuel cell systems it has been developing for military applications for more than a decade. The fuel-cell lab is located about 20 mi (32 km) from a new fuel-cell development lab that GM is building in Pontiac, MI. Physical materials and data will be shared between the facilities. Most of GM's fuel-cell work will take place there. In July, GM and Honda announced a long-term, definitive master agreement to co-develop a next-generation fuel-cell system and hydrogen storage technologies, aiming for the 2020 time frame. According to the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index, GM ranked No. 1 in total fuel-cell patents filed between 2002 and 2012.