"Structural Composite Battery for Small UAVs"

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vital to modern military operations, providing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and real-time situational awareness, enhancing operational efficiency, and minimizing risks to personnel. However, current UAV designs face challenges related to flight duration, mission capabilities, and structural efficiency, limiting their performance for extended missions and adaptability to operational needs. This project is targeting innovative solutions to these issues by developing structural battery solutions that will enable lightweight multifunctional structures, that can reduce weight, improve performance and efficiency, extend mission duration, and provide feasibility to add new capabilities or functionalities to small UAVs within current mass/volume envelope, thereby maintaining a technical advantage in the battlefield. While there have been some efforts in the development of structural battery designs, current solutions result in significant reduction in battery performance and/or poor structural properties. Especially, both commercial lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries as well as researched structural battery solutions, do not provide any shear strength as the battery components (electrode and separator materials) are only loosely held together.  This is expected to be the major failure mechanism for batteries under mechanical loads. A novel structural battery solution, that provides both structural benefits and excellent battery performance, is hence needed.During the Phase I effort, Lynntech has demonstrated feasibility for a structural battery solution for UAVs with tunable shear strength values and excellent battery performance to address both structural and battery requirements.   Single cell structural battery prototype was fabricated based on the full-scale design developed for Raven RQ-11B as a target UAV platform.  The prototype was tested for battery performance under expected shear load for Raven wing structure using 3-point bending experiments.  It demonstrated excellent performance with fast charge-discharge cycling with no effect from cycling the mechanical load. Building upon the success of the Phase I project, the Phase II effort will continue to support the path forward for the technology development and demonstration of scaled structural battery prototype, targeted for identified UAV application platform, such as Raven RQ-11B.