TLG - Media, page-3017

For me, graphene is a super exciting thing, even though our core business is related to anodes. Talga has really achieved a lot in r&d here. I think graphene will change our lives more than we think so far. But that takes time. As has been said here, Rome was not built in a day.

As for charging the batteries while driving: I think Talga has shown her ideas here with her research, like so many, and what could be possible. I still can't imagine that we will have graphene charging roads in the near future and for me that is because of these challenges:

1.) In the pictures you can see how they embedded a thick conductor and that they found a solution for the stretching and shrinking of the concrete (not asphalt), but only for a thick single conductor. But to realise charging you need a coil and not a single conductor for induction and I don't know how to realise that. This is much easier to implement with copper and is already happening with railways. [Induction in cooking pots works differently, I mean it works via vortex currents and the conductive resistance.]

2.) The distance between the transmitter and receiver coil on the car is also important. At the charging stations in car parks or parking boxes, where this works relatively well, the lower coil moves to contact the coil on the car to increase the efficiency. Unfortunately I don't have a phone that can charge wirelessly, otherwise I would try it with a book between the pad and the phone. The distance between the coil embedded in the asphalt and the bottom of the car is large. And you have to protect the coil under the car.

3.) Costs from two perspectives: Graphene is still very expensive, but Talga will be in pool position here when the mine is ramped up. But then you still need a lot of it. Especially if this is not going to be a single project loading line, but is going to be done in many countries on many lines. Side problem: The cars would certainly drive extra slowly in these sections to load as much as possible. Maybe there would even be traffic jams.
If this were not just a single project charging line, perhaps subsidised by the state, but were installed throughout the country, then there would have to be a billing system for the electricity costs. Nobody gives anything away on a grand scale. That might be easy to solve, but it popped into my head if there were something like that on the Autobahnen (highways) here in Germany.

I think that was a thought from the time when batteries only had a low energy density and the prospect of the next generations was not yet as concrete as it is today. I suspect it will become less important with longer ranges and fast charging, perhaps supported by supercapacitors. But who knows. There are the sci-fi films from the sixties with autonomous driving.

I don't want to say that it is not theoretically possible, but I don't see a solution to the three problem areas and they are only three. I can think of many more. It's like the old sci-fi books for me, graphene can make a lift to space possible, but not in the next few years. And certainly not in the long term, when it comes to making money. The r&d is there to show possibilities and Talga has done that masterfully. And Talga, in my opinion, has chosen the best option, which is easy to implement, which can earn money and where the need is huge and, furthermore, the political pressure is there and there is still an enormous practical added value. The coating of ships. Another field will probably be concrete, which is much more stable with graphene. Entirely new constructions would be conceivable in this way. A pilot project with a star architect is needed for a breakthrough in the media.

Above all this are the costs. And that's where Talga is perfectly positioned, I think. The subject area is super exciting. We're only talking about flake graphene here. I imagine what will happen when you can process it on a large scale in a composite! Other interesting projects where Talga will not be involved are processors (Aixtron as an example). I can imagine that the graphene processors could be an intermediate step to the quantum computing. Or the heaters with graphene mentioned in the reports. When I say graphene coated, I mean glass planes, because graphene only reduces light by 4%. I think Applied Graphene specialises in coating here. I can't see this as heating entire streets, since we don't even know where we're going to get the electricity for EVs or the Green Deal or electrification here. The Greens would run up a storm if we started heating streets. Perhaps it will find individual application.

Supercapacitors are the next big breakthrough and are already real. Skeleton is very far along here. They need graphene and Talga could deliver soon. I suspect that supercapacitors will find a very large field of application when the price of graphene drops. First as energy buffers in server centres and then certainly in EVs. You can absorb a lot of energy in a few seconds, for example when braking or at charging stations to get a few kilometres further, as an additional option or intermediate step to the long charging times. But that's just a fantasy, I don't know if it will happen for EVs.

I find it all exciting and that is why I have written so much here. But back to our core competence, the only natural graphite horse in the race for EVs in the EU.