Talga Resources has developed a battery anode material that delivers much better energy density – and it’s headed for some of the world’s largest electronics companies.
Batteries are made up of an anode (positive) electrode and a cathode (negative) electrode and the electrical current flows between the two.
The company (ASX:TLG) revealed today that its graphene silicon battery anode product, called Talnode-Si, increases the amount of energy a lithium-ion battery can store by around 70 per cent compared to graphite-only anodes.
The news pushed shares up over 5 per cent to an intra-day high of 39.5c.
Talga’s product also matches the performance of silicon-only anodes but can be scaled up much more easily and cost effectively.
“These results are obviously very good compared to graphite only and they’re in line with what is being published by other specialists who use silicon only anodes,” managing director Mark Thompson told Stockhead.
“However most of the silicon anode technologies that exist today require highly engineered three-dimensional nanoparticles and they have problems with scale and cost.
“So essentially what it boils down to is our silicon anode enriched material is high-performance but we’re making it in an economically scalable way.”
Talga will send commercial samples to “some of the world’s largest electronic corporations” at the end of February.
But for confidentiality reasons Mr Thomson could not reveal which ones or how many, saying only that there are “more than several”.
“We’ve had a genuinely strong response from certain electronics companies who have got products that require better battery performance in actually pretty short order,” he said.
“So they’re very interested in these sorts of materials which are not your standard anodes, but your higher performance anodes.”
Talga’s product uses a “fairly low cost basic form of silicon” which is processed to wrap up with the company’s graphene to make the whole particle work.
The product uses 15 per cent silicon loading.
“There’s companies like LG already using 3-5 per cent type silicon loadings already in some of their higher performing materials and this is not only expected, it’s rising quite rapidly,” Mr Thompson said.
“So having a silicon-based type product is a good way of insulating yourself from being left behind on the technology heap.”
Talga is developing graphene and graphite enhanced products for the multi-billion dollar global battery, coatings, construction and composites markets.
The company has graphite deposits in Sweden.
Source: stockhead.com.au
