Upscaling of the Structural Batteries to Hybrid Electric Aircraft

Structural Batteries (SB) are considered a promising new technology for the next generation of hybrid electric airliners made of composite materials. The introduction of this type of embedded batteries into the aircraft industry presents new challenges involving the current manufacturing processes applied to composite aircraft components, certification issues, design methods, integration matters and accessibility considerations, up to issues related to the connection to on-board electrical systems.

This work provides an assessment of the feasibility of the structural batteries at aircraft level for different categories of aircraft. It has been carried out as part of the SOLIFLY project, funded by the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No. 101007577. This project has identified the pros and cons, technology gaps and recommendations for the integration of this type of batteries in commercial aircraft for short-, medium- (2035) and long-term (2050) applications. The current and predicted performance parameters of the SB concepts, developed in the SOLIFLY project, have been used in this work to analyze the effectiveness of their applicability on some existing configurations of different commercial aircraft. The results of this study show that SB concepts certainly represent an innovative technology for the aviation decarbonization and they appear very promising for weight savings.