Products · Intelligent Payloads and Accessories

Battery Charging and Field Power

Field power is a through-put problem. How many batteries can you charge between sorties decides how many sorties you actually fly.

9 of 10Method note

Overview

Compute the cycle: flight time, charge time and the number of charge channels you can power on site.
Charging in a vehicle or from a generator has its own limits, and both differ from a wall socket.
Cold weather reduces both available capacity and acceptable charge rate; plan a warm storage method.
Battery records — cycles, depth of discharge, storage voltage — are what make a pack's history auditable.

Field power is a logistics problem that ends days early

Programmes plan aircraft numbers and flight hours and then discover that the binding constraint was never the aircraft — it was how many battery cycles the field setup can deliver per day. Charging capacity, charging time, transport and the power source available on site together determine the number of sorties achievable, and they are usually the cheapest thing to fix and the most commonly overlooked.

Start from the arithmetic. Sorties per day times battery packs per sortie times charge time per pack, divided by the number of chargers operating in parallel, gives the charging hours required. Compare that to the working day. If the two are close, the programme has no slack and any disruption removes sorties.

The second arithmetic is energy. Packs per day times pack energy is the energy the field setup must deliver, and that determines whether a generator, a vehicle supply, a site supply or stored power is required. This is where remote sites get difficult, because delivering meaningful energy off-grid is a logistics task in its own right.

Charging practice that protects the packs

Battery life is governed substantially by how packs are charged and stored, and the practices that matter are unglamorous: avoid charging packs that are still hot from flight, avoid storing at full charge for long periods, avoid deep discharge, and keep packs within their temperature range during both use and charging.

Temperature is the dominant factor and it cuts both ways. Cold reduces usable capacity during flight and is a real range consideration on mountain and winter operations. Heat accelerates degradation during charging and storage. A field setup that charges hot packs in direct sun will consume its battery inventory faster than one that manages temperature.

Rotation and record keeping are the other half. Packs should be identified, cycled in rotation rather than by convenience, and their usage recorded. That is what makes a degradation trend visible before it becomes a flight-day problem, and it is what makes a failure diagnosable rather than mysterious.

Field power sources and what they imply

The options are site mains supply, a generator, a vehicle-based supply, or stored power carried to site. Each has a different implication. Mains is the cheapest per kilowatt-hour where it exists and is often available at fixed sites. A generator provides power anywhere but brings fuel logistics, noise, maintenance and often a constraint on where it can be placed.

Vehicle supply is frequently the most practical for mobile operations because the vehicle is already going to the site, but it delivers limited power and it couples the charging setup to the vehicle's availability. Stored power avoids noise and fuel but its capacity is finite and it has to be recharged somewhere.

Decide on the working pattern rather than on the equipment. A fixed site used daily justifies installing charging infrastructure. A sequence of one-off sites favours a vehicle or generator setup that travels. A remote multi-day site may justify stored power plus a generator, with the generator run in bursts rather than continuously.

Transport, safety and the rules for packs

Lithium batteries are classified as dangerous goods for transport, and the rules governing how many, in what state of charge, in what packaging and by what means they may be carried are real and vary by mode and jurisdiction. Where a programme moves packs by road, by air or by sea, the applicable rules should be established before planning, because they affect how many can be carried at all.

Storage and charging practice in the field should be deliberate. Charge in a location separated from flammable material, on a non-combustible surface, and where a thermal event would not propagate to other packs or to equipment. This is a proportionate precaution, not an alarmist one, and it is cheap to implement in a field setup.

Damaged packs need a rule. A pack that has been in an incident, has been punctured, or is swollen should be removed from service and handled according to a written procedure rather than set aside and forgotten. Our responsible procurement and conduct note covers the general standard we apply.

Sizing a field power setup

The sizing sequence is: sorties per day and packs per sortie; charge time per pack; chargers in parallel; energy per day; then the source and the transport and safety rules that apply. That produces a concrete equipment list rather than an estimate.

Where a programme has an unusual pattern — very high daily sortie counts, remote multi-day sites, extreme temperatures, or transport constraints on pack numbers — the setup should be designed rather than assembled. Our battery and power configuration work covers that design.

Send your sorties per day, aircraft and pack type, working day length, site power availability and transport constraints to our engineering team. We will size the charging setup and the field power source, and tell you where the constraint on your programme actually sits.