One way or another and to varying degrees, aviation is making a transformational switch to replace fossil fuels with electricity. This is driving a need to be able to manage and distribute much higher voltages than the industry has ever needed before, and to do so safely and efficiently.
This has opened a major new opportunity for previously unheralded specialists in equipment such as power contactors and cabling. One such company is TE Connectivity, which is rising to the challenge of helping aircraft manufacturers deal with high-voltage, direct-current loads as high as 1,000 volts. Karl Kitts, the company’s senior engineering manager for advanced systems architecture, recently published a paper called "Trends in Aerospace Power Distribution" that provides a useful summary of the issues now being urgently addressed for new aircraft such as eVTOL air taxis.
Unsurprisingly, safety is a big consideration. “For instance, the amount of time you have to react to a failure condition is much shorter than with traditional power systems,” Kitts told FutureFlight. “So you need much faster circuit protection and the traditional circuit breakers used on aircraft are too slow to react. With these power levels, you could burn through a fuel line very quickly.”
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