The company has already flagged its next key performance milestone for Q4 as it continues to execute a market-leading R&D strategy. Image: Getty
Tech
The company has already flagged its next key performance milestone for Q4 as it continues to execute a market-leading R&D strategy.
Diversified technology company Strategic Elements (ASX:SOR) has executed on the latest milestone in the development of its game changing self-charging battery technology.
The company confirmed yesterday that its prototype Battery Ink technology produced more than a milliamp of electrical current from humidity in the air in the latest round of testing over a three-day period.
The breakthrough marks a “significant achievement” in the development of technology, which has the capacity to disrupt the global wearable electronics industry – a market which generates in excess of US$10bn each year.
SOR’s self-charging battery solution is a game changer in the wearable electronics sector, where short battery life is cited as a key limitation for existing products.
In its market update, the company cited the example of glucose monitoring patches which are approximately 6cm x 6cm in size, and use “low-cost batteries with a capacity of 220 mAh (milliamp hours)”.
The battery life is approximately three days, which puts a limitation on users and limits the number of other products and functions the device can be integrated with.
In that context, SOR successfully fabricated a 6cm x 6cm prototype which produced over 1mA (milliamp) of current output (under load) in a 35-hour testing period, and over 100 mAh of electric charge over three days.
Importantly, the company said that its technology can be used to directly power a device, or as a compliment to existing devices for extended battery life.
“These different use cases provide alternative commercialisation and partnering options,” SOR said.
In addition, the research team expects to leverage its early success into more significant performance improvement in the coming months, as the prototype ink becomes “increasingly optimised for use in screen printing equipment”.
For now, the successful 1mA trial marks confirmation of the development timeline SOR flagged at the end of June, when it announced plans to build a prototype battery pack that can generate over a milliamp of power before the end of Q3.
The latest breakthrough marks a continuation of SOR’s ability to set and achieve key performance benchmarks in technological development.
Development has progressed from “low voltages to 0.8V per cell, small scale ink to 1-litre batches and from microamp to milliamp range of electric current output”, the company noted.
Those increases have been combined with concurrent improvements in screen printing and fabrication technology, setting the foundation for the project’s next phase of development.
In the short-term, SOR’s immediate focus is on further enlargement of the Battery Ink cells, combined with simpler architecture to create a template for increased power.
For its next key milestone, the company aims to increase output to over 5mA and produce at least 220 mAh of electric charge from a single Battery Ink device, before the end of the December quarter.
Given that the technology is still in its relatively early stages of development, the UNSW team has already identified new research pathways to further test the upper limit of the technology’s capacity in terms of power output, duration and energy density.
The company’s initial commercial focus will be on the skin patch segment of the wearable electronics market, given its global size and the fact that SOR’s technology already meets some of the power requirements achieved by in-market commercial products.
Secondary work has also commenced to test battery sell size and product architecture for additional electronic market segments that require higher power output.
This article was developed in collaboration with Strategic Elements, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
Get the latest Stockhead news delivered free to your inbox.
