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The Use of Electric Batteries for Civil Aircraft Applications is a comprehensive and focused collection of SAE International technical papers, covering both the past and the present of the efforts to develop batteries that can be specifically installed in commercial aircraft. Recently, major commercial aircraft manufacturers started investigating the possibility of using Li-Ion batteries at roughly the same time that the military launched their first applications. As industry events unfolded, the FAA and committees from RTCA and SAE continued efforts to create meaningful standards for the design, testing, and certification of Li-Ion battery systems for commercial aviation. The first document issued was RTCA DO-311 on Mar. 13, 2008. As the industry continues to develop concepts and designs for the safe utilization of the new Li-Ion battery systems, many are already working on designs for all-electric aircraft, and small two-seat training aircraft are currently flying.

Aviation propulsion development continues to rely upon fossil fuels for the vast majority of commercial and military applications. Until these fuels are depleted or abandoned, burning them will continue to jeopardize air quality and provoke increased regulation. With those challenges in mind, research and development of more efficient and electric propulsion systems will expand. Fuel-cell technology is but one example that addresses such emission and resource challenges, and others, including negligible acoustic emissions and the potential to leverage current infrastructure models. For now, these technologies are consigned to smaller aircraft applications, but are expected to mature toward use in larger aircraft. Additionally, measures such as electric/conventional hybrid configurations will ultimately increase efficiencies and knowledge of electric systems while minimizing industrial costs.

The ability to successfully predict industrial product performance during service life provides benefits for producers and users. This book addresses methods to improve product quality, reliability, and durability during the product life cycle, along with methods to avoid costs that can negatively impact profitability plans. The methods presented can be applied to reducing risk in the research and design processes and integration with manufacturing methods to successfully predict product performance. This approach incorporates components that are based on simulations in the laboratory. The results are combined with in-field testing to determine degradation parameters. These approaches result in improvements to product quality, performance, safety, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Half the electric vehicle market value lies in larger road vehicles, notably cars, and here the legal restrictions are weaker or non-existent, and range anxiety compels most people to buy hybrids if they go electric at all. Over eight million hybrid cars will be made in 2025, each with a range extender, the additional power source that distinguishes them from pure electric cars. Add to that significant money spent on the same devices in buses, military vehicles, boats and so on and a major new market emerges. Whereas today's range extenders usually consist of little more than off- the- shelf internal combustion engines, these are rapidly being replaced by second- generation range extenders consisting of piston engines designed from scratch for fairly constant load. However, a more radical departure is the third- generation micro turbines and fuel cells that work at constant load.

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is a relatively new subject, with its roots back in the space sector of the early 1990s. Although many of the papers written around that time did not refer to it as IVHM, the fundamental principles of considering an integrated end-to-end system to monitor the overall health of the asset were clearly visible. As the subject of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and its associated technologies have grown up, businesses are making the transformation from selling a product to selling a service. This can be viewed as a positive disruption, as a relatively small technology breakthrough is being brought to market for a large business benefit. The sequence “sense—acquire—transfer—analyze—act “ feeds the information (processed data) on the asset’s health into the Operations or Management control center.