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

Wright Electric was founded in 2016 to build electric airplanes 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 US Department of Defense.

For example, 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. The new announcement is for Wright’s US 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.

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.