We now have a process for economically mass-producing our micro supercapacitors and our Directors and key personnel have taken direct stakes in the company.

Patent Update

Since we published the astounding results on our graphene micro planar supercapacitors 2 years ago, we have been working toward developing a device that not only demonstrates similar performance but can be produced at scale to deliver an economically viable device… After all, if we can’t make them economically, we’ll never make enough to make a difference…

The last 2 years of work culminated last week in our filing of a new patent titled: Capacitive energy storage device and method of producing same (Australian Provisional Patent Application 2017903619). The new patent covers:

• The design of our new energy storage device, being a planar micro supercapacitor printed on a porous film;
• Our technique of stacking multiple layers of planar supercapacitors to create a 3-D device that has ground-breaking energy and power density characteristics; and, most importantly,
• Our method for printing these devices so that they can be mass produced at low cost.

The critical element in this new technology is our ability to print the supercapacitors in the 1000s per minute, rather than individually creating each device with an expensive, direct-write approaches using lasers or ion beams. The technology builds on our existing patent relating to graphene oxide membranes and it means we can create these devices as easily as factories today produce food packaging and labels using gravure printers.

The team is now working on assembling the prototype device which is scheduled for completion in the next 6 weeks before we go into trials for a period of several months. The expected end result is a supercapacitor energy storage device comprised of printed graphene micro planar supercapacitors that can be produced economically at scale.

We are extremely excited about this development as it brings us well within sight of a commercial product. The next steps involve identifying appropriate, world leading partners with whom we can introduce this technology into products such as medical devices, wearable technologies, IoT devices or remote sensing applications.

This addition to our suite of patents further strengthens Ionic’s IP position that already includes valuable patents on graphene oxide membranes, environmentally friendly graphene production and our original graphene micro supercapacitors.

Directors Interests

As we approach the end of our current round of capital raising, we think it’s appropriate to inform you about the interests of our Directors in the company. Ionic Directors Peter Armitage, Merlin Allan, Simon Savage and to its lead researcher Associate Professor Mainak Majumder have directly invested over $220,000, which well exceeds their respective entitlements under the recent capital raising initiatives.

Gravure printed supercapacitors

This image, directly from the patent applications, is a sheet of our supercapacitor devices, printed using industrial scale, gravure printing methods. The larger squares are the contacts that connect to whatever device is being powered. The micro supercapacitors are the much smaller elements, in arrays of up to 100 devices.
If you’d like any further information on our latest research, capital raising or Directors, please reach out by responding to this email.