Boeing Dreamliner 787

• The US and Japan have grounded their Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircrafts due to concerns over it battery safety.
• Recently, a battery-fault warning on an All Nippon Airways Dreamliner in Japan forced an emergency landing.
• Lithium Batteries
• Although all air-planes have batteries, but the Dreamliner requires powerful batteries because Dreamliner’s control systems are driven entirely by electrical signals in place of the hydraulic controls found in traditional generations of jets
• Boeing depends in part on lithium-ion batteries, which provide quick and powerful charges. Designers needed something which is light in weight and at the same time gives high power output. So, they opted for Lithium-ion technology batteries which have an unusually high energy density
• Lithium-ion technology is the same technology that we see in in the batteries of most modern smartphones and laptop computers, where the demands are rather similar, but on a much smaller scale.
• Another big advantage of using Lithium-ion units: These can be moulded into a variety of shapes
• Airbus A380 superjumbo also uses the same technology
• Disadvantage
• Lithium-ion batteries require more careful management than other types of battery due to the ‘Thermal Runaway problem’.(smoking and catching fire)
• Also these batteries are Vulnerable to problems and leaks of battery fluid. When the problem of leakage starts, the fuel can in turn ignite automatically.