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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.

Larger airframes drove the development of electrical systems, capable of quickly and reliably starting the new higher power engines. These soon gave rise to the need for engine-mounted electrical generators as the primary source of in-flight power for the electrical loads and onboard recharging of the aircraft battery system. Of all the backup power sources, batteries represent the most common means of storing energy for auxiliary or emergency power requirements. It is not unusual for a typical commercial airliner, such as a B-737 or A-320, to have dozens of batteries on board. Over time, multiple battery chemistries were put to the test and the industry is still working on the optimal option. The lithium-ion technology has been gaining acceptance, with some important aspects to be considered: the application type, basic safety requirements and the presence or absence of humans on the vehicle.

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.

Solar Energy Harvesting: How to Generate Thermal and Electric Power Simultaneously describes energy harvesting using a hybrid concentrating photovoltaic (PV) system with simultaneous thermal generation for energy storage. Several designs have been proposed to build a system that takes advantage of the entire solar spectrum through direct electric generation using concentrated light onto photovoltaics while generating thermal energy using wavelengths of light not captured by the PV cell. This title addresses the current technologies and state-of-the-art designs, as well as the methodologies, underlying physics, and engineering implications.

This monograph covers the fundamentals, fabrication, testing, and modeling of ambient energy harvesters based on three main streams of energy-harvesting mechanisms: piezoelectrics, ferroelectrics, and pyroelectrics. It addresses their commercial and biomedical applications, as well as the latest research results. Graduate students, scientists, engineers, researchers, and those new to the field will find this book a handy and crucial reference because it provides a comprehensive perspective on the basic concepts and recent developments in this rapidly expanding field.

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.

The electric vehicle industry - land, water and air - is rapidly rising to become a market of over $533 billion by 2025. Some run entirely on harvested energy as with solar lake boats. Others recycle energy as with regenerative braking of cars, buses and military vehicles harvesting kinetic energy. Others use different forms of harvesting either to charge the traction batteries, or to drive autonomous device. In some cases, harvesting is making completely new forms of electric vehicle possible such as "glider" Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that can stay at sea for years, gaining electricity from both wave power and sunshine. Multiple forms of energy harvesting on one vehicle are becoming more common from cars to superyachts.

This book is an introductory text describing methods of harvesting electrical energy from mechanical potential and kinetic energy. The book focuses on the methods of transferring mechanical energy to energy conversion transducers of various types, including piezoelectric, electromagnetic, electrostatic, and magnetostrictive transducers. Methods that have been developed for collecting, conditioning, and delivering the generated electrical energy to a load, as well as their potential use as self-powered sensors, are described. The book should be of interest to those who want to know the potentials as well as shortcomings of energy harvesting technology. The book is particularly useful for energy harvesting system designers as it provides a systematic approach to the selection of the proper transduction mechanisms and methods of interfacing with a host system and electrical energy collection and conditioning options.

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.