Lilium achieves main wing transition and deep dives on battery technology

Lil­i­um has announced that its tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor Phoenix 2 is the first ever full-size elec­tric jet air­craft to tran­si­tion from hov­er to wing-borne flight, a land­mark moment for Lil­i­um and for elec­tric avi­a­tion as a whole.

From a flight physics per­spec­tive, com­plet­ing tran­si­tion means the air­flow going over the flaps attach­es and becomes smooth, allow­ing the lift to be gen­er­at­ed by the wing as in con­ven­tion­al fixed wing air­craft, rather than by the engines, which is the case dur­ing the hov­er­ing phase.

Phoenix 2 has now achieved this mile­stone across the entire main wing while remain­ing sta­ble and behav­ing as pre­dict­ed by Lilium’s pro­pri­etary flight dynam­ics mod­el.

Phoenix chief engi­neer and Lil­i­um co-founder Matthias Mein­er, said: “Main wing tran­si­tion is a huge step for­ward on our path to launch and full cred­it goes to the out­stand­ing Lil­i­um team who worked so hard to get us here.”

Lil­i­um will con­tin­ue the flight test cam­paign through­out the sum­mer, includ­ing tran­si­tion of the for­ward canards and high-speed flights.

Last month, Lil­i­um began the next phase of flight test­ing for Phoenix 2 at the Atlas Flight Test Cen­tre in Vil­lacar­ril­lo, south­ern Spain, after suc­cess­ful flight test­ing in south­ern Ger­many last year.

Lil­i­um also plans to intro­duce Phoenix 3, an addi­tion­al demon­stra­tor air­craft sched­uled to arrive in Spain for the first flight this sum­mer, allow­ing Lil­i­um to increase learn­ings and reduce pro­gram risks.

Mean­while, the com­pa­ny has iden­ti­fied and licensed bat­tery cell tech­nol­o­gy for eVTOL appli­ca­tions to meet spe­cif­ic per­for­mance require­ments and achieve a range over 250 km, and a man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ner with the com­pe­tence to build cells on a scale to achieve its com­mer­cial and sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals.

Lilium’s engi­neers col­lab­o­rat­ed with Zen­labs for over two years, and con­clud­ed that its pouch cell lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies using high-sil­i­con anode and high-nick­el cath­ode offered the best solu­tion for achiev­ing per­for­mance, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and scale pro­duc­tion.

Zen­labs released test data from Ener­gy Assur­ance, a third-par­ty test­ing lab­o­ra­to­ry, which demon­strates that its cell can main­tain a high spe­cif­ic pow­er of 2500 W/kg even at a low state of charge.

Yes­ter­day, Lil­i­um and Livent, one of the world’s lead­ing pro­duc­ers of high-per­for­mance lithi­um bat­tery cells, announced a research and devel­op­ment (R&D) col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment.