A powerful new battery could give us electric planes that

don’t pollute
technologyreview.com/s/612351/top-battery-scientists-have-a-plan-to-electrify-flight-and-slash-airline-emissions

Brightly colored molecular models line two walls of Yet-Ming Chiang’s office at MIT. Chiang, a
materials science professor and serial battery entrepreneur, has spent much of his career
studying how slightly different arrangements of those sticks and spheres add up to radically
different outcomes in energy storage.

But he and his colleague, Venkat Viswanathan, are taking a different approach to reach their
next goal, altering not the composition of the batteries but the alignment of the compounds
within them. By applying magnetic forces to straighten the tortuous path that lithium ions
navigate through the electrodes, the scientists believe, they could significantly boost the rate
at which the device discharges electricity.

That shot of power could open up a use that has long eluded batteries: meeting the huge
demands of a passenger aircraft at liftoff. If it works as hoped, it would enable regional
commuter flights that don’t burn fuel or produce direct climate emissions.

Viswanathan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie

Mellon, initiated and is leading the research project. He and Chiang are now collaborating
with 24M, the lithium-ion battery manufacturer Chiang cofounded in 2010, and Zunum Aero, an
aircraft startup based in Bothell, Washington, to develop and test prototype batteries
specifically designed for the needs of an advanced hybrid plane.

Eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions from airplanes is one of the hardest challenges in the
climate puzzle. Air travel accounts for around 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions and is
one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse-gas pollution.

But there are no clean alternatives today for more than a tiny sliver of air travel, because the
batteries powering electric cars are still too expensive, heavy, and otherwise poorly suited for
aviation.

More than a dozen companies, including Uber, Airbus, and Boeing, are already exploring the
potential to electrify small aircraft, creating the equivalent of flying taxis that can cover around
100 miles (161 kilometers) on a charge. The hope is that these one- or two-passenger vehicles
—in most cases envisioned as autonomous vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—could shorten
commutes, ease congestion, and reduce vehicle emissions. But these would largely replace
car rides for the rich, not displace air travel.

Viswanathan and Chiang are aiming higher. The initial plan is to develop a battery that could
power a 12-person plane with 400 miles (644 kilometers) of range—enough to make trips
from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, or New York to Washington. In a second phase, they
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hope to enable an electric plane capable of carrying 50 people the same distance.

Such planes would still be equipped with a combustion engine and carry fuel. But the fuel
would largely be on board to achieve the US Federal Aviation Administration’s “reserve
requirement” for safety, which instructs aircraft to carry enough to land at an airport 200 miles
(322 kilometers) from the intended destination. In a normal flight, the planes shouldn’t have to
tap into that fuel.

Airborne
The appeal of the project to a startup like Zunum is obvious: the better that batteries get at
meeting the needs of aircraft, the bigger the market that hybrid or electric planes can
potentially address.

Last year, the company announced plans to deliver a line of “hybrid to electric” aircraft with
room for 12 passengers in 2022.

At launch, the company intends to offer a hybrid plane with a gas turbine and two battery
packs capable of flying around 700 miles (1,127 kilometers), as well as an all-electric version
with three battery packs and a range of less than 200 miles. (Unlike the planes Viswanathan
and Chiang have in mind, the hybrid model would draw heavily on the on-board fuel.) But
crucially, the plane itself is expected to feature an open architecture that allows owners to
switch out these modules over time, enabling them to upgrade to better batteries developed in
the future or shift from hybrid to all-electric operation.

Zunum has secured capital from Boeing, JetBlue, and the State of Washington’s Clean Energy
Fund. JetSuite, a Dallas-based charter flight company, has agreed to purchase up to 100 of the
planes. Other startups, including Eviation Aircraft and Wright Electric, are also working to
develop small electric planes for commuter-length flights.

This clip shows what happens when magnetic forces are applied to magnetic microrods mixed
in with electrode materials.
Courtesy of MIT researcher Jonathan Sander

Planes are rarely used for regional travel, representing less than 1% of trips under 500 miles,
according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics . Airlines have shied away from shorter
flights largely because most of the fuel is burned during takeoff, meaning longer routes are far
more economical. And given the high costs and hassles of flying, consumers largely opt for
cars, trains, or buses instead for this travel range.

Zunum chief executive Ashish Kumar, previously an executive at Microsoft and Google,
believes hybrid planes could change these habits—in large part by cutting the cost of fuel and,
in turn, fares. “In most parts of the world you could double your domestic air miles as people
get off the highway and into faster aircraft,” he says.

A greedy battery
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During a meeting in Chiang’s office in early September, Viswanathan underscored the
challenges of electrifying aviation by pulling up a chart displaying the discharge profile of a
battery pack across a flight path. It’s an alpine wall in the first minutes of the flight. Then it
drops dramatically to a long, flat plateau as the plane reaches cruising altitude.

In other words, a battery must be able to deliver a massive amount of power at takeoff, and
pack enough energy density to cruise for at least hundreds of miles. But to work within the
confines of aircraft physics and economics, it also needs to be as long-lasting and light as
possible, and capable of rapid charging—or at least, as Zunum plans, able to be easily
swapped for a fully charged battery between flights.

Viswanathan notes that a standard Tesla-style battery pack may check the first two boxes. But
takeoff would be like driving a Model S in “ludicrous mode” for four minutes instead of a few
seconds, generating a massive amount of heat.

“You’d fry the battery,” he says.

That would radically shorten the lifetime of very expensive battery packs.

This clip shows what happens when magnetic forces are applied to magnetic droplets mixed
in with electrode materials.
Courtesy of MIT researcher Jonathan Sander

Getting lithium-ion batteries to discharge at a rate fast enough for aircraft requires making it
easier for ions and electrons to flow through the battery, particularly the electrodes. One
option is to make the electrode materials more porous or thinner, but either of those changes
would come at a steep cost to energy density.

So instead, the researchers are exploring ways to straighten the twisting paths through tightly
packed carbon, cobalt compounds, and other materials in the electrodes.

As in many a magical illusion, the trick relies on magnets.

In a 2016 paper in Nature Energy, Chiang, MIT researcher Jonathan Sander, and colleagues
showed that mixing magnetic nanoparticles into the electrode materials, and applying a light
magnetic field, helped to create aligned pathways through the electrodes.

Subsequent tests found the discharge capacity of these electrodes, or the rate at which
electrons can travel out of the battery, was more than double that of conventional lithium-ion
batteries—without sacrificing energy density.

“It’s opening up a whole new direction in what we can get out of batteries for electric aviation,”
Chiang said.

The researchers are now working with 24M in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Chiang also
serves as chief scientist, to develop and test prototype batteries using this magnetic approach.
If all goes well, Zunum will then work with the researchers to evaluate the prototypes in what

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are known as “copper bird” tests, in which all the plane’s electricity systems are evaluated on
the ground. Eventually, they could be tested in actual flights as well.

Simon Simard

Just the start

Until the batteries are actually created and evaluated, it remains to be seen how well this
approach will really work. And even in the best-case scenario, the field is still probably decades
away from electrifying more than a fraction of total air miles.

Richard Anderson, an aerospace engineer and director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical

University’s Eagle Flight Research Center, points out that batteries are at least 20 times heavier
than fuel for a given amount of energy output. He is skeptical that companies pursuing hybrid
commuter flights, like Zunum, can find enough ways to offset that added weight in the next
few years. He also thinks the field is overestimating how quickly hybrid planes will be able to
reach longer distances—while underestimating the regulatory challenges they’ll face.

The MIT and Carnegie researchers themselves are quick to say that other big battery
improvements will still be required to extend the range of electric planes, which may
necessitate a shift to entirely different chemistries. On top of that, planes will probably need to
be fundamentally redesigned to reduce energy demands, potentially by redistributing motors
or changing the shape of the body to reduce drag, Viswanathan says.

But he and Chiang are working to develop a technical capability that would be
required regardless of any other advances. Even if other battery engineers find ways to make
electric planes to fly a thousand miles, they’ll still need enough power to get off the ground.

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