Naval Research Lab Fuel Cell Unmanned Air Vehicle Completes 23-Hour Flight
Found out this drone uses a product I helped bring to market earlier this year. It is a non-isolated DC-DC converter that has current limiting capability, making to useful for charging batteries. There were a lot of problems with it when I first started working on it. To prevent current from flowing from the output to the input, there are FETs on the output that only turn on when the unit is enabled. When I first worked on it, I could not figure out why the unit was getting so hot even when there was no load. Finally, I blew up those FETs somehow, and we realized that they were not getting turned on, and that the unit was working because the current was going through the body diode of those FETs.
It's exciting to see it actually be used for something, especially in cutting edge research, even if it is a military application, haha.
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