The Challenges and Opportunities of Battery-Powered Flight

Sustainable transportation and aviation are critical to address climate change and renewable energy powered battery electric vehicles represent a promising path towards this goal. I will discuss the performance metrics needed of batteries for electric land and air vehicles, and assess the energy-efficiency of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft compared to ground vehicles.^[1]  Identifying the challenging but achievable battery performance requirements for eVTOL, I will discuss our approach to achieve simultaneously high specific energy and power by using lithium metal anodes, enabled through a new density-driven dendrite suppression mechanism realized through a soft polymer-ceramic composite separator^[2].  I will discuss the unique performance failure mode related to power fade for eVTOLs rather than energy fade for electric vehicles. Following this, I will discuss the requirements and challenges for all-electric battery-powered single and twin-aisle aircraft and outline battery chemistry innovations that offer a pathway to approaching these requirements.^[3] I will discuss two key tools to accelerate the innovation timeline for these battery chemistries: (i) in-situ and operando characterization^[4] (ii) closed-loop battery material discovery with physics based simulation and robotic experimentation.^[5] 

References: [1] Sripad, Viswanathan, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 9, 2021 118 (45) e2111164118 [2] Fu et al., Nature Materials, (2020), 19, 758–766. [3] Viswanathan et al., Nature, 601, 519–525 (2022), [4] Hafiz et al., Nature, 594, 213–216 (2021) [5] Dave et al., Nature Communications, 13, 5454 (2022).