Strategic Elements Ltd (ASX:SOR) has achieved a critical milestone with its self-charging battery technology by manufacturing a one litre batch size of Battery Ink with the capacity to produce 2000 battery cells. The technology is demonstrating strong potential to scale up with production capacity rapidly increasing tenfold from 200 to 2000 battery cells.
Intellectual Property gained through development of the company’s printable memory ink technology has enabled the company and the University of New South Wales to achieve this milestone rapidly and very early in the development process. The next key milestone is fabrication of a prototype battery pack of multiple connected Battery Ink cells producing 3.7 Volts due for completion in January 2021.
The scaled-up ink was used to fabricate five Battery Ink cells that:
- Successfully harvested energy from humidity in the air and generated a minimum of 0.8 Volts over a testing period of two hours.
- Were able to achieve 1cm in size and 10-20 microns thick (thinner than human hair).
- Successfully achieved very fast re-charging time of three minutes.
- Showed no degradation in performance compared to the smaller scale 200 ml batch size ink.
Due to high cost of large volume production and difficulty in controlling electrical properties graphene electronics are currently mostly limited to relatively small volumes and mainly restricted to R&D and academic uses.
However, one of the key advantages of the Battery Ink technology is that it is based on a graphene derivative called graphene oxide (GO) which is much more available, cheaper and easier to manufacture than graphene due to superior dispersity. GO based technologies therefore have the potential to enter production sooner. Testing of the Battery Ink shows that an individual Battery Ink cell contains tens of thousands of layered nanosheets of graphene oxide.
Strategic believes battery Ink cells have strong potential competitive advantages over existing lithium-based batteries that suffer from size, rigidness, weight, safety (flammable), environmental issues and most significantly require replacement or re-charging of batteries.
Electronic Skin Patch Example Sector
The potential is highlighted by looking at one example application of electronic skin patches. Skin patches are wearable products that have integrated electronic components such as sensors and communication components attached to the surface of the skin to relay vital information about the human body. These are wearable products attached to the body such as cosmetic, strain, diabetes or cardiovascular monitoring. They produced USD 10 billion in revenue in 20191 despite most successful products today still being relatively bulky devices requiring manual charging.
Human skin is known to generate elevated levels of humidity to 90%. The scaled-up ink Battery Ink cells were tested to determine if they could operate in humidity of 65 -85%. All Battery Ink cells generated 0.8 Volts over the testing period of two hours with no sign of degradation. Further testing will be conducted in the future to replicate the humidity levels of the skin. This shows strong potential for the Battery Ink cells to provide a flexible, light, self-recharging power source for the electronic skin patch sector that is forecast to grow to nearly USD 40 billion by 20301.
3.7 Volt Battery Pack Milestone
The company will continue to refine, test and improve the scaled-up ink as part of its ongoing development plan. However, the next milestone in focus is to fabricate a successful prototype battery pack containing multiple connected self-charging battery cells capable of producing 3.7 Volts from humidity in the air. Work will also occur concurrently on increasing current output at lower humidity levels. The prototype battery pack is expected to be completed in January 2021.
About the Battery Ink Technology
The self-charging battery technology is being developed under a collaboration with the University of New South Wales and CSIRO partially funded by the Federal Government2. The Battery Ink cells are ideally suited for use in Internet of Things (IOT) devices and wearable technologies. The global battery market for IOT was worth US$8.7 billion in 2009 and forecast to be US$15.9 billion in 20253. The Battery Ink is being developed by integrating significant existing ink formulation and printed electronics intellectual property from the company’s Nanocube Memory Ink technology with an advanced graphene oxide material.
