Investigation of Reconfigurable Battery Efficiency for an Application in an Electrical Sailplane

This article examines various concepts for propulsion battery concepts for a glider aircraft. These are distinguished by the type of battery pack and by the DC/AC inverter. The different concepts are a conventional battery with fixed series and parallel configuration connected to a three-level inverter, a variable DC voltage source based on dynamically Reconfigurable Battery System (RBS) as the main energy storage unit connected to the same inverter as in a conventional case. The third one is a multi-level energy system containing separate flexibly configurable battery modules for each phase of the electrical motor. All considerations will be made for a three-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor for the maximum power of 80 kW. For each of the energy storage concepts an analysis of the efficiency of the whole system as well as its sub-components was made.