Overview of the State of the Art in Battery Packaging and Elaboration of a Safe Design Process for Battery Packs in Large Electric Aircraft

A significant part of the aviation industry is currently working on the transition to all-electric aircraft, which use battery systems for power supply, to further reduce emissions. While some manufacturers have already announced appropriate battery solutions, the energy density at battery cell level is only sufficient to power small electric aircraft for short range flights. Thus, there is currently no commercially available large aircraft powered solely by batteries. Moreover, the mass and volume overhead at module and pack level poses a challenge as well. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the state of the art in battery pack design in order to derive conclusions for future design concepts and to suggest design combinations for use in large electric aircraft. For that, the different options for the core elements of a module, namely the battery cells, the battery management system (BMS) and the battery thermal management system (BTMS) are compared and evaluated. In accordance with the VDI 2221 guideline, a design process for battery packs is developed. Based on that, the selection process is explained in detail and conducted to elaborate appropriate concepts. The concept evaluation demonstrates which of them are viable and how the individual elements affect each other. Hence, this study contributes to the reduction of the volume and mass overhead of the pack design and will increase the feasibility of battery-powered all-electric aircraft.