Battery Technologies for Military, Drone, and Aerospace Applications

This presentation updates last year’s work by concentrating on three critical areas for high‑voltage battery integration in More‑Electric Aircraft. First, we examine interconnect reliability, addressing terminal and insulation wear at high altitude and elevated voltages. Second, we compare safety architectures—internal fusing within the battery assembly versus external fusing—highlighting trade‑offs for failure containment. Third, we present best‑practice design guidelines for battery‑management‑system (BMS) circuit cards. In contrast, the previous talk focused on vehicle‑level load‑integration topics. Additional discussion covers: (a) the benefits of modular, lower‑voltage sub‑assemblies for optimized air‑frame fit and (b) practical considerations for harness routing and installation of high‑voltage packs. Collectively, these insights provide designers with actionable strategies to mitigate reliability risks and streamline integration of high‑voltage energy storage in future aircraft.

The needs of battery technology for electric aviation are greatly different from consumer electronics and electric ground vehicles. This talk will discuss how the lithium-ion battery cells of today can empower these technologies, and how the design and chemistry of these battery cells differ from those in other applications such as EVs. Battery pack design considerations for aerospace will also be highlighted, especially those around safety and thermal runaway management.

Open-source flight simulation environments such as ArduPilot and PX4 model aerodynamics and control in detail, but the battery is often reduced to a simplified capacity or state-of-charge representation. This presentation shows how coupling blueflite Cobalt flight data with AVL battery and powertrain simulation and weather-aware 4D mission analysis closes that gap, enabling virtual mission testing that exposes thermal limits, energy reserves, and failsafe margins before flight.

Military environments are among the most challenging and demanding settings for a system. Battery-reliant platforms operating in these conditions require rigorous engineering to ensure predictable, reliable, and safe performance. From corrosion and vibration to extreme temperature, humidity, sand, dust, and salt fog, successful certification and deployment depends on understanding the environmental profile it will face over its service life.

Metallic particle contaminants, or foreign object debris (FOD), threaten battery safety by causing internal short circuits. While CT scans are an effective detection method, manual analysis is time-consuming. Here, we present Glimpse’s automated particle detection workflow. By using cells with embedded FOD to build a validated ground-truth dataset, our algorithm reliably identifies contaminants across various sizes and compositions. This innovation significantly improves efficiency and accuracy in non-destructive FOD detection for quality assurance.