The development of battery-powered electric aircraft for use in commercial aviation involves various performance- and safety-based challenges. Cells with high energy densities (for instance Li-Ion pouches) are required to meet the performance requirements, with those currently available encompassing a risk of thermal runaway and other failures. To enable their use, this work provides an investigation into battery abuse conditions and their effect on the overall safety of the system, tailored to electric aviation. A system architecture is presented for a battery-powered electric aircraft, including recommended mitigation methods for the presented failure modes. A framework for determining the overall State of Safety based on the relevant abuse conditions is presented. It is found that the influence of atmospheric operation conditions, flight profiles and vibrations provide the most notable differences between battery-associated risks for aircraft and ground vehicle purposes. Quantification and experimental validation of the impact of these conditions is recommended as a direction for future work.
Zijl et al. (Thu,) studied this question.