U.S.-based company ready to challenge China’s drone motor dominance
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
A U.S.-based electric-motor manufacturer is hoping to become a major supplier to American drone manufacturing companies, by offering a product that can out-compete with Chinese drone-motor makers in terms of cost and efficiency.
Officials of Radford, Virginia-based Orsani Inc. told DroneLife that their company is poised to rapidly ramp up its manufacturing capabilities to accommodate a hoped-for increase in demand for its proprietary slot-less electric motors by companies that build unmanned aerial vehicles as well as maritime and land-based drones.
“We are bringing back manufacturing (motor manufacturing and appliance manufacturing) to the U.S.” said Orsani Vice President Muhammad Mubeen.
The company has a history of displacing Chinese technology with components made in the U.S., Mubeen said. Oransi was started in 2009 with the mission to sell air purifiers, which were designed by Oransi and manufactured in China.
In 2021 Orsani merged with Aviemore Technologies, a manufacturer of slot-less motors, with a goal of using Aviemore’s motor manufacturing innovation to enable the combined company to bring back manufacturing to the United States. “Meanwhile, as a separate segment of our business, we are selling our innovative slot-less motors technology to other [original equipment manufacturers] who can benefit from the powerful hands-down advantages this technology has to offer,” he said.
With annual sales of about $10 million, the company maintains a 156,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, where it employs its core technology to produce permanent-magnet motors, the kind of motors employed in Tesla’s cars. Unlike most permanent-magnet motors, which are of the “slotted-stator” type, Orsani offers slot-less motors.
Instead of employing slots in the stator to keep the coils of wire at the heart of the motor in place, Orsani’s motors use chemistry to maintain the placement of the wire coils. “This is the core of our technology, which is incredibly simple and therefore inherently low-cost,” Mubeen said.
Slot-less motors have been around a long time and are used in a variety of high-tech applications, such as powering the Mars Rover. “But they are notoriously hard to manufacture and therefore are too expensive for most mainstream applications,” he said. “What Oransi brings to the table are extremely simple, and patented, manufacturing methods, which achieve low enough costs to make our slot-less motors suitable for all high-volume applications.”
The company’s slot-less motors have a number of advantages, which make them ideal for use in the manufacture of drones, Mubeen said. They are about 30% lighter in weight than conventional slotted motors, which can translate to drones capable of carrying 30% larger payloads, or to UAVs with 30% extended range. The Orsani motors also result in lower power losses at higher speeds, quieter operation, lower vibration and extended battery life when compared with more conventional motors, he said.
Orsani Chief Operating Officer Ben Khandan-Barani said that for U.S.-based drone manufacturers, another selling point for is that his company’s motors are 100% American-made.
“The Israel and Ukraine wars have exposed the U.S. infrastructure supply chain from a national security aspect,” he said. Currently, about 90% of all drones and drone motor manufacturers are based in China. “What we bring to the table is a value proposition of providing a domestic motor that is equal or below the Chinese cost, has better performance quality aspects and is made here in the U.S.”
He added U.S. lawmakers are considering legislation to limit or ban the importation of drone and/or their components from China, causing further anxiety for U.S. drone manufacturers.
“If you ban the Chinese motors and drones, who’s going to backfill that infrastructure?” he asked. “We have a technology that can compete with the Chinese drones and drone motors.”
The Orsani officials said the company already provides its slot-less motors to some U.S. drone manufacturers. While non-disclosure agreements prevent Orsani from revealing their names, Khandan-Barani said its current customers cover a broad range of sizes and types of drone manufacturing companies.
“It goes all the way from the FPV drone types, to the high-level, heavy-payload drones produced by pretty well-established public companies,” he said. Orsani’s drone customers also include companies that produce unmanned vehicles that operate on land and water, as well as UAVs.
As the company increases its business of selling motors into the U.S. drone-manufacturing market, it plans to employ unused space in its Radford manufacturing plant. The facility, which the company acquired last April, has plenty of room to accommodate a significant expansion of manufacturing capacity.
Mubeen said that for any other company wishing to launch a drone motor manufacturing business the initial costs would be quite high.
“The way we are approaching it, our tooling cost is minimal, and there is no special equipment required,” he said. Given the company’s years of experience in producing slot-less motors, Orsani will be able to quickly adapt its manufacturing processes to accommodate the production of a range of different sized motors, depending on the fluctuations in the demand for its products.
“You can go from a 1-inch-diameter motor to a 10-inch-diameter motor. You can do it in an incredibly fast fashion, so that is another hidden commercial advantage,” he said.
The company’s manufacturing capacity is also scalable in regard to the number of units it can produce in a given time period, said Khandan-Barani. “We are able to go from the tens of thousands (of motors) up to 100,000, to the millions. We just have got to have those customers who are ready to rock and roll in that aspect,” he said.
In addition, Peter Mann, Orsani’s CEO, said the company’s location in southwestern Virginia gives it another commercial advantage over potential competitors in the drone-motor production market.
“This area is really a leading motor hub in the U.S.,” he said. “There’s a lot of engineering talent in the area and our team has several people with decades of experience each, in designing motors and motion-control products.”
He added that with the company’s established electric motor technology, Orsani is well-positioned to expand its business serving the drone-manufacturing market.
“It’s really just leveraging the technology that we have,” he said. Orsani has “the platform to supply these motors for drone applications and make them in the U.S., for anyone looking to move away from the Chinese suppliers or looking for a U.S. supplier that’s more comparable in price to the Chinese.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
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