Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Gets Smarter, Lighter, and More Powerful

Powering Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has challenges and solutions. Continuing the series on this vertical on Future of Air Transportation, host Tyler Kern sat down with Marcus Priest, Senior Principal Engineer at TE Connectivity.

As UAM becomes more complex and mainstream, the configuration and needs around power are evolving. That requires new components that drive higher capacity but also stay small and light.

TE Connectivity is answering the call from the industry. “As a supplier to aerospace companies, we have well-suited platforms and are always innovating to deliver products for emerging markets,” Priest said.

The UAM space also requires higher working voltages for more robust electricity. Priest explained that demand impacts components, wiring, cabling and connectors. “Our main focus is on the size, weight, and power, or SWaP. We want to keep things light and small but have more power,” he said.

To meet the needs of this market, TE Connectivity has been able to use previous products and reconfigure them. The new trend for this application is distributed power systems. TE is developing higher voltage, smarter switching capabilities that will work well with the distributed power model, which is similar to the utility grid.

There are also similarities between development for this sector and electric vehicles. Hybrid electric mobility groups and the UAM team work together.

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