RTX business Pratt & Whitney Canada has unveiled a mobile charging unit (MCU) to support its hybrid-electric flight demonstrator. Assembled from commercially available components, the MCU can deliver up to 280 kW and 1500 volts; compatible with megawatt-capable charging aspirations across the industry.
“High voltage, bidirectional charging systems will be critical for a growing number of electric and hybrid-electric systems including aircraft, as well as other transport applications,” commented Alexandre Gagnon, vice president of corporate affairs, Pratt & Whitney Canada.
The charger’s bidirectional capacity ‘enables it to both charge and discharge batteries, which creates opportunities to recycle unused energy back into the electrical grid’.
The MCU was developed in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the Innovative Vehicle Institute (IVI). Pratt & Whitney Canada developed the distributed control and protection strategy, while the NRC focused on the hardware design, assembling, testing and delivery of two charger units, which will be used as part of the RTX hybrid-electric flight demonstrator project.
Pratt & Whitney Canada completed a successful power test of the demonstrator’s one-megawatt electric motor in June 2023. Following integration of the project’s hybrid-electric propulsion system to a Dash 8-100 airframe, flight testing is targeted to begin in 2024, noted the company at the time.