Update on 787 Battery Problems

Joe Gwinn · 2013-03-24T18:50:07+00:00

I just read the 18 March 2013 issue of Aviation Week. On pages 28-29, there are two articles on the 787 battery investigation results and proposed fixes. What caught my eye, and apparently that of the investigators, was that there was never an all-up test of the 787 battery charging system with the actual Yuasa-made production battery. They were tested independently, but there is no record of them ever being tested together. Anyway, the fixes are basically to isolate the cells better so if one self-destructs, it cannot take the other cells with it, venting of smoke overboard, better electrical insulation all around, and a lot of black-box data recording so they can figure out root cause next time. Joe Gwinn

Mar 24, 2013 24 Replies

Rate this thread:

clare 13 years ago

Anyone with half a brain could have predicted it.

Vote

Tim Wescott 13 years ago

Doing something astonishing is different than doing something safe.

Safe is boring. Crashes, exploding airplanes, and in-air fires are astonishing.

Vote

Jim Wilkins 13 years ago

It's hard enough to turn the prototype into working product when engineering and production are in the same building.

formatting link

"ECOs can compensate for design errors found during debug or changes that are made to the design specification to compensate for design problems in other areas of the system design."

Considerable effort is needed to make sure they don't interact, and can be applied out of sequence if necessary.

jsw

Vote