The UK National Lithium-Ion Spacecraft Battery Programme

This paper describes a UK National Program to develop batteries based on a commercially available Lithium-carbon cell with a nameplate energy of 9.5 Wh. This is possible because of the commercial links between AEA Technology and Sony Corporation of Japan. This Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) component is subjected to LAT and screening to ensure high reliability. The benefits of this approach are the potential cost savings over traditional approaches, and the very near-term flight readiness of qualified hardware. The principle of using the Sony Li-ion cells to construct a battery was proven on a 108 Wh Li-ion battery for the STRV-1d programme. This has been successfully qualified, including life-testing to 1000 cycles and will be flown in 1999. Following this, two modular battery units with nominal energies of 100 Wh and 1 kWh have been developed and environmentally qualified. The target applications are small LEO/MEO missions and large LEO/GEO missions.