ePropelled relies on innovation, strong supply chains for growth
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
In the increasingly competitive world of drone-component manufacturing, technological innovation and access to the supply chains that provide the crucial raw materials for production are keys for market success.
Fortunately for Laconia, New Hampshire-based manufacturer ePropelled, these are two areas in which the company has focused a lot of its attention. “It’s a very high-technology-rich company,” ePropelled’s founder, chairman and CEO Nick Grewal said in an interview with DroneLife.
ePropelled, which specialized in smart-propulsion and energy management systems for uncrewed vehicles, recently announced it has achieved 47 patents, granted or pending, across 13 product lines.
Recent patent achievements include a U.S. patent for an advanced UAV generator design, which was granted in June, and an application for a European patent relating to an advanced cooling system for a UAV generator, which the company expects to be granted in October.
To help secure a steady supply of the materials needed to build its products, ePropelled announced a joint development agreement with Oklahoma-based USA Rare Earth. The partnership calls for the two companies to develop a strategic supply-and-purchase relationship, in which USA Rare Earth will provide sintered neo-magnets for use in ePropelled’s motors built for the uncrewed vehicles market.
The growing company recently completed the expansion of its manufacturing plants in its hometown of Laconia, where it produces the motors and generator systems that will go into powering unmanned vehicles both in the air and on the ground.
“We are actually winding electric machines at quite high speed and our goal is to get up to a 100,00 to 150,000 motors a year, in the next couple or three months,” Grewal said. “We are actually doing the bolts and boxes that drive these motors. The controllers and intelligent power systems, they are being done in the UK.”
ePropelled produces electric motors and generation-and-power-management systems of various sizes and outputs to satisfy power needs across a wide variety of designs and sizes of unmanned vehicles. Its motors range from the tiny ones that run at 50,000 to 60,000 rpms to the 12-kilowatt propulsion motor that puts out 20 kilowatts at its peak. Its generators, which are often used in combination with its electric motors in large hybrid-powered drones, range in output from 750 watts to 10,000 watts.
These hybrid power systems can be used on drones to sustain a long-range flight, such as a delivery route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, or a military mission between Kiev and Moscow, Grewal said.
“You can’t fly on batteries alone because they’re just too heavy. So, you need a hybrid drone,” he said. The drone’s gas engine can provide propulsion, “but more importantly you need power for the navigation, your GPS and your flight control, et cetera. You need power for all that stuff and the generator can provide you with that.”
Adapting to changing markets
ePropelled, which was launched in 2018, has seen the market for drone components change rapidly over the last several years and the company has had to adjust its growth strategy to accommodate those changes, Grewal said.
“We initially started by doing propulsion systems for EVs (electric vehicles) and flying things,” he said. However, within two to three years of its launch, the company began to see significant market disruptions. “There was COVID, so that slowed us down a bit. Then there was post-COVID so this has been a continuous thing.”
In the 2021-22 timeframe, company officials decided that its focus on the development of systems for EVs was not moving ePropelled in the right direction.
“We decided that EVs are not going to be it and we needed to get into unmanned systems. So, we decided to do propulsion and power generation on drones. And that was very successful,” Grewal said.
The company began developing drone propulsion and power generation systems for companies primarily in Ukraine, and by last year, the majority of its products went into that country.
“Unfortunately, since the tail end of last year when our politics changed a little bit, we haven’t had one order from Ukraine,” Grewal said. “So, we actually pivoted again in the sales area.” The company went from supplying a handful of non-Ukrainian customs last year to upwards of 100 currently.
Grewal said he doesn’t know why the Ukrainians stopped buying his company’s drone components, but he speculated that the Ukrainian drone industry could have matured to a point where it was capable of producing its own propulsion and generation systems, rather than relying on a third-country supplier such as ePropelled.
At any rate, ePropelled was able to find a number of customers in other nations willing and eager to buy its products. “But I think there are a lot of people now from Turkey to Germany to the UK, Israel and India,” he said. Other customers deploying ePropelled generators hail from Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
While retaining its roots as a U.S.-based manufacturer, ePropelled has expanded its reach as a global player. In addition to maintaining engineering and manufacturing operations in the UK, in 2020, the company opened up an office in Chennai, a city in southeastern India.
“I can’t say that we are a startup anymore,” Grewal said. “It’s turned out that we are a startup that’s globally local, because we are in three continents and we’ve learned to work really well with each other, thanks to the internet, Zoom, et cetera.”
Maintaining robust supply chains
Grewal said ePropelled also has taken steps to ensure it has strong supply chains — particularly in regard to rare earth minerals that are critical to the production of magnets and other components that underlie much of the technology that drives the world’s economy.
“I think the rare-earth materials are really important for any high-tech product, whether it’s an iPhone or it’s an aircraft or it’s motors for EVs,” he said. In recent months securing access to rare-earth materials has become a big issue, because of the trade disputes involving China, which produces the vast majority of rare-earth derived products, and the rest of the world.
“Rare earths get mined all around the world. There are rare earths being dug up in Nevada, Australia, South America, in Europe, and of course in China. But the problem is that it’s only in China, where they’re actually refining this stuff to make it into magnetic material and make components out of it,” Grewal said.
Several years ago, ePropelled’s leaders recognized the potential for access to rare-earth materials to become a problem and took steps to protect the company’s access to the valuable commodities, he said.
“So, we’ve actually been talking to people outside of China, like in Japan, Germany. There’s a company in the UK that does recycling of the magnetic material. They didn’t actually dig it out of the mines, but nonetheless it’s a way of actually using your rare earths again and again,” he said.
Grewal also cited ePropelled’s recent deal with USA Rare Earth to ensure that the manufacturing company has access to the refined rare-earth materials with their highly sought-after magnetic properties.
“We also realized that these materials may not come on board for three months or six months from now. People have told us that ‘We’ll get you the material in Q4,’ but we don’t have it yet,” he said.
“So, we have been actually trying to get material and just putting it into our locker, into the bottom drawer, so to speak.” He said the company likely has secured a six-month to one-year supply of the critical materials, which it now holds in reserve.
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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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