Battery Emulation in Aerospace and Defense

Modern aerospace and defense platforms increasingly depend on advanced battery systems, from UAV propulsion and soldier-borne electronics to autonomous ground vehicles and space-borne subsystems. Accurately reproducing battery behavior in the lab—without the cost, risk, and time penalties of using physical cells—is essential to validating system performance, optimizing battery management algorithms, and ensuring mission readiness. Keysight’s battery emulation solution combines the precision of ATE system power supplies, the thermal and power-handling of dissipator units, and the flexibility of automated emulation software to form a unified platform for mission-representative battery testing.

Battery behavior is inherently complex and nonlinear: internal resistance changes with state-of-charge (SoC), transient power delivery varies with load dynamics, and aging effects alter capacity and responsiveness over time. Additionally, defense systems must operate across extreme temperatures, altitudes, and duty cycles. Reproducing such conditions with physical batteries is slow, hazardous, and often impractical. Keysight’s approach virtualizes battery models so engineers can instantly switch SoC, reproduce nonlinear voltage/current curves, and inject degradation profiles or fault conditions—without waiting for long charge/discharge cycles or risking thermal runaway.

The platform accelerates test development by enabling faster-than-real-time replay of charge–discharge profiles. This allows teams to compress months of cycling into hours or days, rapidly exposing firmware, power electronics, and BMS logic to long-term behaviors and edge cases. By scripting programmable run-downs, discharge sequences, and aging simulations, engineers can quantify runtime, examine capacity fade, and validate BMS responses to real-world mission profiles. Crucially, these emulations are deterministic and software-defined, enabling repeatable scenarios across labs and programs and ensuring consistent results for certification and audit trails.

Safety and risk reduction are core benefits. Physical cells, particularly in high-energy or high-power tests, carry the risk of thermal events, toxic materials, and catastrophic failure. Emulation removes these hazards by replacing cells with a controlled electronic source and dissipator units that emulate energy delivery and absorption under regulated conditions. Built-in protections guard against overvoltage, overcurrent, and unsafe thermal conditions while enabling aggressive stress testing in a safe, observable environment.

Measurement fidelity is another distinguishing capability. Keysight’s measurement hardware tightly synchronizes current and voltage digitizers with the emulation control plane, capturing transient and steady-state behaviors with high resolution. Engineers can examine instantaneous power, transient overshoots, and inrush behaviors that matter for power converters, motor drives, and BMS control loops. High-resolution logging and automated data capture facilitate correlation with software traces and system telemetry, improving root-cause analysis and speeding debug cycles.

The solution also enables exploration of rare but mission-critical edge cases—sudden voltage collapse, extreme cold-start behavior, rapid propulsion bursts, or aged-battery high-impedance conditions—that are difficult or dangerous to reproduce using actual cells. Emulation empowers teams to validate fault-handling strategies, optimize power-flow architectures, and certify that devices and systems retain mission capability under degraded conditions.

Finally, Keysight’s unified platform delivers operational efficiencies: simplified wiring and test architectures, reduced instrument count, and lower integration overhead. Organizations benefit from a single software environment to author profiles, run campaigns, and share validated emulation models across teams and locations. These efficiencies shorten development cycles, reduce lab footprint, and accelerate time-to-certification for battery-powered systems.

In sum, Keysight’s battery emulation offering provides defense and aerospace teams with a practical, high-fidelity, and safer alternative to physical-cell testing—speeding development, improving reliability, and enabling comprehensive validation across real-world and edge-case mission profiles.