Integrated analysis of electric aircraft performance and battery design through coupled modeling of flight and battery dynamics

Electric aviation has emerged as a focus of research in recent years. One of the greatest hindrances to the wider adoption of electric aircraft is the inability of current battery technology to simultaneously provide high gravimetric energy density and power density over a wide range of operating conditions while ensuring safety and reliability. In this work, we develop a coupled framework consisting of longitudinal flight dynamics for a fixed-wing aircraft and electrochemical battery dynamics to analyze battery performance and limitations under the dynamics load representative of an aircraft propulsion system. Using this framework, we conduct simulations to analyze the effect of electrode design parameters and material properties, flight control variables, and operating temperature on the system-level performance. We find that cruise velocity has the greatest impact on aircraft range, with the range being 30 % higher at the optimal cruise velocity compared to the lowest range observed at the highest cruise velocity. The cell-level limiting current is found to drop by 50 % at 0 °C compared to 30 °C which leads to significant power limitation and approximately 10 % reduction in the aircraft range. Optimal electrode design parameters have been found to increase the range and limiting current by approximately 15 % and 150 %, respectively, compared to the design values representative of the cell considered in this study.