Airbus and Renault Group to advance research on electrification

Air­bus and Renault Group have signed a research and devel­op­ment agree­ment which aims at enhanc­ing trans­ver­sal­i­ties and syn­er­gies to accel­er­ate both com­pa­nies’ elec­tri­fi­ca­tion roadmaps.

This part­ner­ship will help Air­bus mature tech­nolo­gies asso­ci­at­ed with future hybrid-elec­tric air­craft and were detailed at the Air­bus Sum­mit which has just tak­en place.

Air­bus and Renault Group’s engi­neer­ing teams will join forces to mature tech­nolo­gies relat­ed to ener­gy stor­age, which remains one of the main road­blocks for the devel­op­ment of long-range elec­tric vehi­cles.

The coop­er­a­tion agree­ment will notably cov­er ener­gy man­age­ment opti­mi­sa­tion and bat­tery weight improve­ment, and will look for the best path­ways to move from cur­rent advanced lithi­um-ion cell chemistries to all sol­id-state designs which could dou­ble the ener­gy den­si­ty of bat­ter­ies.

Last month, NASA researchers at Glenn Research Cen­ter in Cleve­land start­ed devel­op­ing an inno­v­a­tive bat­tery pack that is lighter, safer, and per­forms bet­ter than bat­ter­ies com­mon­ly used in vehi­cles and large elec­tron­ics today.

NASA’s Sol­id-State Bat­tery Research Exceeds Ini­tial Goals

Renault Group engi­neer­ing exec­u­tive VP Gilles Le Borgne com­ment­ed: “For the first time, two Euro­pean lead­ers from dif­fer­ent indus­tries are shar­ing engi­neer­ing knowl­edge to shape the future of hybrid-elec­tric air­craft.

“Avi­a­tion is an extreme­ly demand­ing field in terms of both safe­ty and ener­gy con­sump­tion, and so is the car indus­try. At Renault Group, our 10 years of expe­ri­ence in the elec­tric vehi­cle val­ue chain gives us some of the strongest feed­back from the field and exper­tise in the per­for­mance of bat­tery man­age­ment sys­tems.”

Air­bus chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer Sabine Klauke added: “Bring­ing togeth­er Renault Group’s expe­ri­ence in elec­tric vehi­cles with our own track record in elec­tric flight demon­stra­tors will allow us to accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment of the dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies required for future hybrid air­craft. It will also fos­ter the emer­gence of com­mon tech­ni­cal and reg­u­la­to­ry stan­dards in sup­port of the clean mobil­i­ty solu­tions need­ed to achieve our cli­mate tar­gets.”

The Air­bus Sum­mit was live streamed from 09:00 CET Paris time on 30 Novem­ber.