Ilika plc (LON:IKA) Chief Executive Officer Graeme Purdy caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the importance of their recent development milestone, how it differs from the D4 milestone, P1 prototypes, interaction with partners and the progress of the Faraday Battery Challenge project.
Q1: Ilika announced that it had reached a further development milestone on its Goliath development roadmap, but Graeme, could you just explain for us the significance?
A1: The announcement that we made this week relates to us achieving lithium-ion energy density parity. So, what that means is that if you take a lithium-ion battery of a given weight, I’m talking about a traditional lithium-ion battery now, and you compare that to the Goliath technology, for a battery of the same weight with the Goliath approach, you will actually have just the same amount of energy contained within that battery.
The reason that that’s significant is when you develop a new technology, you’re always trying to overtake the performance of the existing technology. Early prototypes generally actually aren’t as good as the incumbent technology, but as your technology gets refined and as you move up that classic S-curve, you overtake the existing technology and then start to enjoy the benefits and the USPs of the new technology.
This really is an important milestone because it shows we’re overtaking the performance of the stuff that’s out there at the moment.
Q2: So, how is this different to the D4 milestone announced last month?
A2: On every technology roadmap, it’s important at a certain point in time that you have a design freeze and you don’t change anything and you move forward into a productization phase where effectively you take the results out of the lab and you engineer a product which is reliable, reproducible, and safe.
That’s what we’re doing with the D4 development data point, which actually has got a slightly lower energy density than what we’ve achieved in the lab this week. It means that the engineers have a design basis for producing what we call our P1 prototype, which is what we expect to send out to customers.
Q3: When can we expect the P1 prototypes to start shipping for evaluation from the partners?
A3: The timeline for that is around six months from now so it’ll be in the first half of next year, of 2024, and the team is already working on the productization, if you like, of that technology, that’s moving forward nicely.
Q4: Assuming that they like the properties of P1, what’s the next step for your interaction with the partners?
A4: The whole point of P1 really is to give some partners some experience with our technology so they can test it, get comfortable with it, verify that it’s got the features and benefits that they expect.
We will then engage with them more closely through partnerships in order to work with their engineering teams and get the products integrated into their own roadmaps.
Q5: Just stepping away from that for a minute, how is Ilika’s Faraday Battery Challenge support project progressing?
A5: That project effectively runs in parallel with the whole Goliath development programme and it is a really important collaboration because it allows us to work with some of the leading experts really in the field.
We’re benefiting from fantastic input from some of the UK’s leading universities developing technology for validating and verifying battery technology. Also, working together with Nexeon, who are supplying us with samples of their silicon anode, and some great steering committee oversight actually from WAE and BMW.
