Vertical Aerospace secures £2.3 million funding to develop new smart charger for its VA-1X eVTOL

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space has received £2.3 mil­lion in fund­ing from the Aero­space Tech­nol­o­gy Insti­tute (ATI), to help devel­op a smart charg­er for its lat­est eVTOL pas­sen­ger air­craft, the VA-1X.

The charg­er will help increase in-flight per­for­mance and safe­ty, as well as analyse in-flight and charge event data, which could then be used to opti­mise bat­tery life­time, sched­uled main­te­nance and detect anom­alies.

It will also be able to deter­mine state of charge and detect any poten­tial fail­ures onboard the air­craft’s bat­tery before they hap­pen, and allow Ver­ti­cal Aero­space to pro­duce a pre-flight fit­ness report for the bat­tery.

Limhi Somerville, Head of Ener­gy Stor­age at Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, said: “Bat­tery sys­tems includ­ing charge and diag­nos­tics test­ing are well-known in acad­e­mia and indus­try; hav­ing under­gone years of devel­op­ment and research for the auto­mo­tive mar­ket.

“An aero­space appli­ca­tion pro­vides a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty to utilise meth­ods, designs, mod­els and algo­rithms that were not finan­cial­ly, vol­u­met­ri­cal­ly or tech­ni­cal­ly fea­si­ble before. Using these nov­el approach­es, we plan to sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve the safe­ty, range and capa­bil­i­ty of our bat­tery sys­tem.”

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space will be joined in this project, expect­ed to be com­plet­ed by Octo­ber 2022, by tech­ni­cal experts from the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick.

Most devel­op­ment in bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy in recent years has come from the auto­mo­tive sec­tor, how­ev­er these bat­ter­ies are not opti­mised for avi­a­tion gravi­met­ric ener­gy or pow­er den­si­ty require­ments

The col­lab­o­ra­tion will help pio­neer a new wave of avi­a­tion bat­tery devel­op­ment, tak­ing cut­ting-edge elec­tro­chem­i­cal con­cepts and prin­ci­pals from acad­e­mia and apply them to the pro­duc­tion of a charg­er with an incor­po­rat­ed diag­nos­tic device, effec­tive­ly a smart charg­er.

War­wick Uni­ver­si­ty will research the algo­rithms and mod­els from auto­mo­tive, ground stor­age and acad­e­mia that are suit­able for this appli­ca­tion, with Ver­ti­cal Aero­space then putting this into prac­tice, by cre­at­ing a suit­able charg­er hard­ware which will then be test­ed on one or more of its air­craft.

Pro­fes­sor James Mar­co of the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick, said: “The suc­cess­ful inte­gra­tion and man­age­ment of bat­tery sys­tems with­in future elec­tric air­craft rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant research chal­lenge and one that WMG is excit­ed to be work­ing on in part­ner­ship with Ver­ti­cal Aero­space.

“This project will allow us to expand our capa­bil­i­ties in bat­tery char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, bat­tery sys­tem mod­el­ling and nov­el meth­ods of fault diag­no­sis and prog­no­sis. All with­in a sec­tor that is strate­gi­cal­ly impor­tant for the UK as it move towards its zero emis­sions trans­port tar­gets.”

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space unveiled the VA-1X last month, which is capa­ble to trans­port­ing four pas­sen­gers 100 miles at speeds of 150mph. The com­pa­ny is aim­ing to cer­ti­fy the air­craft as soon as 2024, with the first com­mer­cial ser­vices being oper­a­tional short­ly after.