Ilika plc (LON:IKA) Chief Executive Officer Graeme Purdy caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the completion of the PRIMED programme, improvements in Goliath battery performance, defence opportunities, and progress with Brompton.
Q1: Graeme, just off the back of today’s news, how important was the role of the steering committee in guiding the PRIMED project?
A1: The steering committee was a really important source of industry input for us.
As you know, we had JLR and Professor Paul Shearing from the University of Oxford giving us guidance and of course, JLR’s application knowledge, their deep insights into the automotive industry, was really useful.
On the other hand, Professor Shearing’s broad understanding of the state-of-the-art performance of solid-state batteries was really helpful in helping us position our technology and carry out the right tests to make all of our data comparable with what industry expects.
Q2: Now, you’ve listed six technical performance improvements that you’ve achieved in the project, which would you say was the most important?
A2: One of the things we’ve had really positive feedback on is the consistency of the data and of course, when you scale up a technology and you are providing samples to customers, what’s often really important to the engineers is that they get the same performance from each of the cells. Because of the automated pilot line that we’ve now installed at our facility, we’re able to get much tighter clustering of the performance of the cells. So, that when people get a batch, actually, each of those cells performs just like all of the same cells from that batch.
Q3: About:Energy has independently validated your cells and included them in their The Voltt database for access by pack designers. Will this be useful for your business development efforts?
A3: Yes. So, we’ve talked about wanting to commercialise our 10Ah prototype. It was a prototype that we developed for the automotive industry as an intermediate milestone on our roadmap. We have encountered quite a bit of commercial pull for a battery of that size from a number of different industries, broadly from consumer appliances. We’ve got a relationship with Brompton that we’ve started and of course we’ve had a lot of interest from the defence sector.
By putting our batteries into that database, it actually gives pack designers very easy and rapid access to the cells rather than having to go around and sample everybody that wants them. It’s got independent validation of the performance of the cells. You can also model using the About:Energy software framework, you can model what our cells perform like in a pack.
So, it makes it a much more rapid, much more straightforward process to do the engineering design for your application.
Q4: You referred to the battlefield testing of your cells, are you likely to see some follow-up on that?
A4: That was a piece of testing, a piece of validation that we did earlier in the year and of course, we hadn’t really included that testing as a standard automotive roadmap, because, frankly, shooting bullets through the batteries isn’t really relevant to the automotive industry.
We had that additional bit of testing done by this UK defence agency and that was really positive feedback and has encouraged quite a few designers of applications for different defence situations, different environments, to work with ourselves. We expect some commercial follow-up later in the year.
Q5: You mentioned a few minutes ago the Brompton project, how is that progressing?
A5: Very well, thank you. Of course, we’ve received some grant support from the Battery Innovation Programme, part of Innovate UK’s support in that area. We’re working together with Brompton to provide them with an improved e-bike battery pack for some very stylish e-bike Brompton’s that you can purchase right at the minute.
We’re looking to assess if Goliath can give them a material advantage, both here in the UK and, of course, for their export markets. Brompton is the largest exporter of bikes from the UK, and we’d like to support their business in that product line.
