Wright Electric has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Air Force to develop high power output rechargeable batteries.

Wright Electric was founded in 2016 to build electric aircraft with the goal of reducing the climate impact of the aerospace industry. The company is developing ultra-lightweight motors and batteries for these aircraft, working alongside NASA, Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), and the U.S. Department of Defense. Earlier this year Wright was awarded a contract under the ARPA-E PROPEL-1K program to develop lightweight batteries for transportation applications.

Concurrently, Wright Electric has been identifying industrial and defense-related applications for these motors and batteries. This latest announcement is for Wright’s U.S. Air Force AFWERX SBIR Phase 1 contract, which is designed to explore the possibility of using Wright’s rechargeable thermal batteries in multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) where high power output is crucial.

“We’ve heard from many aerospace and defense customers that they want compact batteries with extremely high power output,” says Aaron Rowe, PhD, Engineering Manager, Batteries, Wright Electric. “Thanks to support from the Air Force, we can take our first steps with a new program to deliver batteries that are extremely compact and capable of ultra high discharge rates.”

Single-use batteries that operate at high temperature, often called thermal batteries, are used in a wide range of military equipment. Wright Electric will leverage additive manufacturing to quickly produce small volumes of rechargeable batteries that can stand in for legacy thermal batteries, ensuring a resilient supply chain of critical defense components.

“Instead of advancing a completely new battery chemistry, our aim is to develop a process that will let us do limited production runs of exotic batteries at a reasonable cost,” says Rowe. We will construct a production line that can very rapidly adapt to the needs of our customers.