If you break open a drone battery, David Hambling notes, you will find a shrink-wrapped block containing smaller batteries:
These cells are described by their size, so an 18650 cell is a cylindrical unit about 18 millimeters in diameter and 65 millimeters in height, while a 2170 is 21mm in diameter and 70 mm high.
A typical laptop battery will contain six 18650 lithium-ion cells. The battery pack for a Tesla Model 3 Long Range made before 2018 contains 2170-type cells, no less than 4,416 of them.
While not all cells are created equal, they are essentially commodity products manufactured by the billion. They’re made mainly by big players in the Far East; China dominates but it does not have a monopoly. Other sources are readily available.
The biggest battery maker by capacity is Chinese outfit CATL, making 132 GWH of cells every year. But the next two are South Korean LG (93 GWH) and Japanese Panasonic (60 GWH), and there are two other Korean outfits, Samsung and SK, in the top ten.
To build your own drone batteries, you have to source quality cells from a reliable supplier and assemble them into battery packs. And that is exactly what Ukrainian drone maker Wild Hornets has been doing for some time.
A video on social media explains Wild Hornets’ process. The building blocks for its battery packs are Samsung 50S, which are optimized for high-power applications and have a respectable 5000 mAH capacity.
The cells are arranged in blocks of 12 in a 6s2p unit (that is, 6 rows of 2 batteries) or 18 in 6s3p (6 rows of 3) configuration. These are connected with metal strips and 0.25 mm copper wiring — “we don’t economize” the presenter says in the video — spot welded into place. Spot welding is costlier than soldering, but more reliable. The completed unit is then securely shrink-wrapped with multiple layers of tough plastic.
[…]
The end result costs a total of $65 for small batteries and $90 for large, similar to commercial drone batteries.
Of course, they’re called batteries because they’re collections of smaller cells:
Benjamin Franklin first used the term “battery” in 1749 when he was doing experiments with electricity using a set of linked Leyden jar capacitors. Franklin grouped a number of the jars into what he described as a “battery”, using the military term for weapons functioning together.
Shrinkwrapping cells into battery packs is not rocket science. You have to read Hambling’s article to discover that some of the Wild Hornet product is very sophisticated. However, it’s critical to remember that the war is between the US and Russia, with Ukrainians the squishy stuff caught between a rock and a hard place. The patriotic Hambling takes care to depict a nation that makes Soyuz rockets, hypersonic missiles, fighter jets and various other high-tech as bumbling amateurs who can’t put a decent drone together.
What’s new about this? It’s much the same thing as “SKD assembly”, only not owned by an umbrella corporation.
Buy the high tech parts and anything else not locally available, in bulk. Ship it all to a small assembly shop somewhere close to the customers. Which uses mostly (often exclusively) unqualified labor, since they only put the end product together.
This saves some overhead, transportation costs (vs. hauling containers inefficiently stuffed with bulky plastic cases full of air, and on top of this lots of plastic foam so they won’t break), and can BS around half-assed attempts at protectionism.
Consumer products were typically made this way in the entire ex-USSR about from the day when the borders opened and cheap OEM parts from SE Asia became available, give or take a week. Not just electronics… unfortunately, since cheap imported metal usually is utter crap.
The common slang term for these “manufacturers” is “screwdriver enterprises”.
And back to UAV… The other side of screwdriver shacks is easy technical deniability, that falls short of plausible if anyone not happy with it is paying attention.
See “The myth of ‘Ukrainian’ drones: What’s really behind the production chain” on RT https://www.rt.com/news/638518-myth-of-ukrainian-drones/
(via Simplicius https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/serious-escalation-russian-mod-implies )