On-Board Battery Monitoring and Prognostics for Electric-Propulsion Aircraft

The reliability of the propulsion system of an aircraft is paramount for the aircraft safety and hence the aircraft health must be monitored continuously. In contrast to fuel-operated aircraft, electric battery-operated propulsion system poses specific problems, such as, the remaining battery power does not linearly decrease and cannot be measured directly. In this paper, we describe a combined monitoring and prognostics architecture that can continuously monitor all components of the electric propulsion system with respect to safety and performance properties as well as state of charge and rest of useful life for the battery. Our system combines a detailed electrochemical battery model for Li-ion batteries with a powerful prognostics engine based upon an Unscented Kalman Filter with the R2U2 monitoring device, which provides efficient observers for metric temporal logic and Bayesian reasoning. R2U2 is a real-time, REALIZABLE, RESPONSIVE, UNOBTRUSIVE UNIT, which continuously monitors sensor readings, outputs of the prognostics engine, as well as the flight software status for safety, performance, and security properties. We illustrate our architecture with two case studies, one reporting actual flight tests with an X8+ octo-copter and the other a software-in-the-loop simulation with an unmanned Edge 540 electric aircraft model.