Aviation battery monitoring electronics in lithium-ion based battery systems for electrified sailplanes and aircrafts

This paper presents the hardware and software design of a battery monitoring circuit developed to be used in aviation applications employing lithium-ion batteries in their electrified powertrain. The considered aircraft is a manned sailplane able to take-off and climb by using its electric propulsion system supplied by NCA/Graphite lithium-ion batteries. The battery monitoring electronics was developed with the highest considerations in terms of fail-safe and fail-operational requirements. The electronic design of the battery monitoring circuit integrates the battery busbars and uses new passive balancing components with an innovative busbar cooling solution, thus increasing the reliability and the robustness of the whole battery system. The software also contributes to the high safety level by employing crosscheck and plausibility check mechanisms.