Haydale Graphene Industr... Share Discussion Threads

[petewy] 16/7/2015 09:02

My view is that they do not pump out enough news.

[gemferret] 16/7/2015 07:32

Timbo

I have checked with someone in the know re nano platelets. My assumption about single layer v multi layer is apparently spot on.

I'm not sure if all were already aware of that so apologies if that's the case.

So if Haydale have a supply source of single layer platelets to combine with their technology for end users then the end product is superior to those supplying multi-layer.

That's the trouble with understanding this sector at the moment as there are lot's of claims out there which all look the same but there is a wide spectrum of performance capability depending on what is used.

I suppose lithium would be a good example as fractions of a percent of a drop in purity make it useless for some markets.

Re Perpetuus, IP may be key there, I haven't looked yet.

I don't like the look of AGM, they seem to keep pumping out news for the sake of it with no substance.

[timbo003] 15/7/2015 19:10

>>>GemFerret, I'll get back to you on this either later this evening or tomorrow morning, I have some (but not all) of the answers to those questions I think.

[gemferret] 15/7/2015 18:22

Apologies

Re Perpetuus, i note some debate about them. Do they have access to single layer platelets. Multilayer are easy to get hold of.

If not then it seems Haydale have taken a leap ahead of them in terms of the potential performance of end products. Multilayer will enhance composites but single layer will be the A standard. I doubt the costs involved vary that much so composite players will want the best available products.

[petewy] 15/7/2015 16:32

Welcome Gemferret (from VRS). Your post's conclusion is ????

[gemferret] 15/7/2015 10:31

Timbo

Thanks for all the detail you post, I've been tracking VRS for a while.

Am I right in my understanding the the plasma tech by both companies is about dispersion of graphene in materials and not the separation of graphite to form graphene ?

That seems to be the point of the VRS and Hayd link up.

Most of the problem seems to be about the understanding of what graphene is. It gets called graphene but the Primark end of the business is known as carbon black as of no use to the high end materials.

EG

I note XG sciences claim they are way ahead and can produce 80 tonnes of graphene nano platelets per year, which is a lot in graphene terms.

What XG say

'Graphene nanoplatelets are particles consisting of multiple layers of graphene. They represent a new class of carbon nanoparticles with multifunctional properties. xGnP® brand graphene nanoplatelets have a very thin but wide aspect ratio as seen below'

They provide a diagram showing multi-layer graphene nano-platelets.

So one would consider XG are the lead (among others) and the likes of Haydale and VRS are at the back of the queue.

However, as I understand it the holy grail is single layer nano platelets which when added to composites transform them.

The way I understand that is to do with percentages of graphene. If you add graphene to levels of 3% then you end up with a useless product as the end material is monumentally different to composites with lower percentages.

If it's multi-layer then naturally adding the same number of platelets would increase the percentage over single layer. Or on the flip-side for the same percentage you get a far higher number of single platelets.

That I am told is the key, but the above is my guess of why that may be the case.

So it would seem XG have technology that can produce better composites than those without graphene but with far less performance than using single layer graphene.

You can't get better than single layer, all that can be improved is the process to get to that point, but that is the missing key in the market, high volume single layer production.

The next thing you need is dispersion technology.

VRS claim to have cracked the single layer code and can produce it commercially. Haydale have cracked dispersion.

If Perpetuus don't have single layer graphene access then they are well behind. I haven't fully read up on them yet.

[timbo003] 09/7/2015 16:00

Haydale Graphene Industries plc CEO Ray Gibbs Interview on Talga Resources Collaboration

[uncle john] 09/7/2015 08:22

Roger Bade in his daily note has described the American deal. His note is widely circulated to investors, brokers and other professionals. (not sure how I qualified) That note from Roger though in careful neutral wording will bring Haydale to many peoples attention.

[timbo003] 08/7/2015 08:48

Haydale Composite Solutions MD Gerry Boyce Interview on Commercialising Graphene

[timbo003] 07/7/2015 15:47

Haydale Graphene Industries & Versarien PLC Interview on Nano Korea

[timbo003] 02/7/2015 00:45

That is certainly encouraging petewy, although it would surprise me if Korea, rather than the USA turned out to be the largest market for Haydale.

On a related topic, I gather that there might be some interesting news regarding a certain competitor in the next couple of weeks, I will expand as soon as I'm able to.

[petewy] 01/7/2015 09:56

NEWS!!!!
Commercial Progress in the United States
Haydale (AIM: HAYD), the group focused on the commercialisation of graphene and other nano particle products using their proprietary plasma process is pleased to announce further progress in North America.
1. Service Agreement with InVentures Group, Inc.
2. Opening of new office

[petewy] 21/6/2015 12:21

Thanks Timbo. Good interview, why isn't this under company news.

[timbo003] 21/6/2015 05:46

There's a new interview with Ray Gibbs commenting on the latest supply agreement with CPI over on Stocktube (link also added to header):

[timbo003] 21/6/2015 05:27

This article (May 27th 2015) illustrates the potential of functionalised graphene in super capacitors.

I was under the mistaken impression that super capacitors could only ever achieve a small percentage of the energy storage capacity of a conventional Lithium ion battery, but this report from S Korea suggests otherwise:



Korean scientists create a graphene supercapacitor that equals Li-ion battery energy density and charges quickly
Scientists of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea developed a graphene supercapacitor that stores as much energy per kilogram as a lithium-ion battery and can be recharged in under four minutes.

The supercapacitor was created in two stages. First, the scientists exposed powdered graphite to oxygen in a controlled manner to produce graphite oxide, then continues to heat the graphite oxide to 160°C in a vessel which had an internal pressure of a tenth of an atmosphere. The chemical reactions that followed produced carbon dioxide and steam. The increased internal pressure these gases created, pushing against the reduced external pressure in the vessel, broke the graphite into its constituent sheets. Those, after a bit of further treatment to remove surplus oxygen, were then suitable for incorporation into a supercapacitor.

The result worked well, storing as much energy per kilogram as a lithium-ion battery and could be recharged in under four minutes. Scaled up to the size needed for a car, the current required to recharge it quickly would require a robust delivery system.

[timbo003] 18/6/2015 18:16

The RNS today refers to "toll processing services"

I have no real world experience of such toll services, so it prompted me to look it up, this was one of the more useful documents I came across:



....and here is an example of a company offering such services:

[petewy] 18/6/2015 12:44

Sorry Selftrade is a waste of time.

[uncle john] 18/6/2015 10:21

Selftrade not accepting Limit orders on HAYD.
quoted 130.2 for Best, hmmm! Maybe!

[uncle john] 18/6/2015 10:13

Spread @7p not encouraging new investors at these prices.

[smarm] 18/6/2015 08:31

Good news today.

S

[packman8] 06/6/2015 08:43

Thanks Timbo, well presented professional report. Feels like it is a small company that is moving forward to be a leader in graphene technology, and it's uses.

[petewy] 06/6/2015 08:28

Thanks Timbo well worth waiting for.
Gave me a good insight into the workings of the Co.

They need a good PRO with regular news bulletins to keep the price going.

[knownowt] 06/6/2015 08:00

Timbo, thank you for an excellent summation of the Haydale Open Day. A couple of points that i feel are worth adding are :
a) The youth (relative to the demographic referred to at the start of your resumé) and the enthusiasm (real)of the employees for the job that they are doing.
b) Gerry Boyce made it very clear why Haydale had acquired EPL and, perhaps more importantly, why he had agreed to 'get into bed' with Haydale.
You listed a number of applications being explored by Haydale Composite Solutions (as EPL is now called), although I had the feeling that they were much closer to production than just exploration. I would like to add comment to the pipeline product : the fact that graphene is inert means that a sleeve inside the pipe renders the pipeline immune to the corrosive elements within the oil/gas and also that the graphene within the composite allows a miniscule current to be passed along the pipeline so that any leakage could be identified immediately.
Another product the potential of which I found exciting was the motorway crash barrier; the innovative design was brilliant but the fact that the galvanised steel currently used leaches zinc into the environment makes the adoption of graphene enhanced plastic a 'no-brainer'(although it doesn't mean that it will be!).
I also drove, but feel that the 400 mile round trip was well worth the effort. I just hope that I haven't collected any speeding tickets to mar the day!
Finally, it struck me as highly ironic that the Russian forensic chemist within the Inks Dept. should have been named Regina.

[timbo003] 06/6/2015 00:36

Haydale's Investor workshop was held on Tuesday June 2nd at the Haydale HQ, located on a small industrial Estate in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire which is about 10 miles after the M4 runs out.

I opted to drive there, so I set off from Woking, Surrey at around 07.20, arrived about 11.10, the weather wasn’t brilliant and there were a few road works, so lots of 50 mph speed restrictions on the M4. I think around half the investors took the Paddington to Port Talbot train which would have taken me even longer with the connections.

I would estimate that there were around 25-30 shareholders present with the normal sort of demographic (predominantly white, male, 50 something).

The meeting began with a welcome from John Knowles (Chairman) and then an overview from Ray Gibbs (CEO), We were provided with a slide set for the CEO’s overview, the main message seemed to be that Haydale are very much focused on routes to market and Ray stressed the importance of the EPL acquisition and the collaborations with Alex Thomson Racing and Tantec (the supplier of the Plasma reactors) for achieving this objective.

We were then split into three groups and taken around on guided tours of the facilities which included the applications labs, the production facility and the analytical testing laboratory. It was a nice touch that it was the lab and production staff (rather than the directors) who took centre stage, we heard about the many potential applications for graphene, although Haydale were concentrating their resources on just a few. the tour focused on inks, solid composites and super capacitors.

After the tour the directors held a brief Q&A session followed by an informal lunch for directors staff and shareholders which consisted off a variety of sandwiches and cold snacks served with wine or soft drinks.

I gathered quite a few pearls of wisdom during from the presentations and the tour, the most notable are summarised below:


Application Labs:


Composites:

Composites are looked after by Haydale Composite Solutions Limited ("HCS") previously known as APL which is headed by Gerry Boyce, they are based up in Loughborough.

The polymer and composite market is worth around $90Bn, the subset which Haydale are interested in are thermoset resins (value $19Bn) which comprise mainly of polyesters (66%) and Epoxy resin (23%). Haydale expect to set up strategic agreements with two large composite manufactures (one for epoxy and one for polyester) later this year, the agreements will be geography specific and will offer a period of exclusivity.

Epoxy and polyester polymers are currently used to make composites which contain strengthening materials such as glass fibre and carbon fibre. There are substantial improvements in tensile properties when Haydale produced graphene is used in a polyester composite (2% addition results in a 210% improvement). It is essential that graphene is derivatized for this purpose; otherwise there is an uneven dispersion of graphene within the matrix. It is also essential that the graphene is produced to strict specifications (quality of starting material, type of functionalization and degree of functionalization being of paramount importance) to ensure the end products made from composites are consistent and meet specifications.

Haydale believe that it is important to get one or more products out there in order to show case the technology, the first of these will probably be a shower tray (non-regulated market) where the product can be shown to be superior in one or more respects (i.e. a drop test). Less trivial applications, for high value, highly regulated markets should follow, such as automotive (5 – 7 years) and aerospace (7 – 10 years).

Applications being actively explored include:
• Avoiding lightning strike damage on aircraft (10 year government funded with 3 aerospace collaborators).
• Reduction in permeability of boat hulls (solves osmosis problem)
• Strengthening strut for electricity pylon arms (ongoing EPL project).
• Outer layer casing for Oil and Gas pipes (graphene adds strength and decreases permeability).

Other applications that got a mention included Wind turbine towers/blades and lorry trailers (1.5 tonne weight saving).

EPL might make prototypes for customers and they could (if required) supply the graphene as a thick composite paste containing around 30% graphene which should allay Health and Safety concerns that the customer may have for handling Nano particulates.

The potential market for grapheme in composites can be conservatively estimated at around 1,500 tonnes of functionalised graphene (based on 2% loading and 1% market penetration).

Inks

From what I could gather "inks" is a broad term to cover inks, paints and thin films, the inks application lab seemed to be equipped for small scale ink manufacture (mixers/stirrers) and for producing thin films, it was stressed that functionalization was essential to provide a homogenously dispersed ink or paint. I suspect there is some knowhow/trade secrets involved with the formulations they are looking at, as I couldn’t get any detailed information out of them regarding the ink composition. The main applications would appear to exploit the conductive properties of graphene for use in electronics (printed circuit boards, RFIDs etc.)

Super capacitors

As the name suggests, super capacitors are like capacitors, only better in terms of capacitance and discharge rate. Super capacitors employ activated graphite as a coating material on the conductive plates within the capacitor, if the graphite is replaced by functionalised graphene it confers a number of advantages, for example reduced size and increased charge/discharge rate, furthermore graphene based capacitors have an exceptionally low internal resistance and hence very little heat production during charge and discharge cycles.

Important applications include:
• Regenerative braking systems in the automotive industry (super capacitors are already used in F1 cars).
• Some electric powered buses are powered with super capacitors on the short hauls between stops (capacitors recharged at the stops).
• Wind turbines: as well as smoothing output super capacitors can provide power to servo motors to change the blade pitch when the turbine is stationary


Plasma reactors:

We were shown two reactors the HT60 (pilot scale) and HT200 (production scale), the HT200 costs roughly twice as much as the H200 yet has up to 10X the capacity. The reactors were supplied by Tantec and modified by Haydale. Interestingly they had Haydale branding on them which seems like a good move. The Haydale modifications mainly involve instrumentation to monitor the critical process variables to ensure production of reproducible product that meets the required specification.
The other method that is commonly used for graphene derivatization is a hot wet acidic slurry method, however this is more difficult to control and involves multiple steps, furthermore the end product requires drying and the resulting derivatized graphene is more variable.


Analytical Labs:

The Haydale labs seem well equipped for characterising starting materials and the derivatized graphene, I got the impression that the two modifications of most interest were oxygenation to carbonyl/ketone (hydrophilic) and fluorine (hydrophobic), It is essential that they can get rapid feedback on what is coming out of the reactors, rather than wait for analysis from a third party laboratory, so the lab is equipped to do this,. The degree of functionalization is assessed by infrared spectroscopy and there is a variety of other equipment for measuring the rheology, stability and homogeneity of suspensions of the derivatized graphene.

We were shown a prototype of a portable, easy to use suspension analyser which Chris Spacie and team have come up with. Apparently the analysis is based on light transmission/light scattering. Haydale have recently filed a UK priority patent application on the concept which I assume is detailed here (the two listed are the same application):


If so, they it will publish in October 2015, so I will keep an eye open for that one.


Q&As:

The Q&A session was held just before lunch and we were running a bit late so it was understandably short also there had been plenty of opportunities to ask questions during the tour of the facilities. I had a couple of related questions concerning what was likely to be the predominant business model and whether we would end up purchasing the reactors, modifying them and leasing them to customers, or whether we would purchase, modify and then just sell machines to customers, the former probably requiring much greater capex than the latter. The response was it will probably depend on the customer, how well we know them and what sort of quantities they require. This lead to my other question which was if the company were to require further funding for working capital would it raise it through a share placing (usually conducted at a discount). The response was that there are no plans to raise further capital in the short term and should further capital be required all options would be considered including placings, I then suggested that if a placing were to be conducted, it would be preferable to have an accompanying open offer so existing shareholders could participate on the same terms as placees, also they should try to structure it so it qualified for EIS tax breaks. The response was it was certainly something they would look at if there were a further fund raising, so I’m now more optimistic on that one.


Lunch:

There was an informal lunch which consisted of sandwiches and other cold snacks with a choice of wine and soft drinks with opportunities to talk to all the directors, staff and other shareholders. I chatted to a couple of the directors about the IP around derivatized graphene and its applications, I think I recall one of them saying something along the lines that he thought my comments (on this blog) regarding the recently published Perpetuus patent application were rather apposite. I also spoke to a few of the staff who had helped out with the guided tour, they all seemed genuinely enthusiastic and motivated, which was reassuring as I have a slight concern that the location of the facility may be a bit too remote for some people to want to work there. The location may not be particularly convenient location for some potential customers either, although I thought I heard Gerry Boyce say that they intend to maintain the Loughborough location for Haydale Composite Solutions. If they do, that should certainly help customer accessibility.


In conclusion, I am glad I made the long haul to attend the meeting; the BOD came over as focused with a realistic plan to enable them to achieve their business objectives. I initially invested in the IPO in April and despite the shaky start in the first few months (mainly down to their incompetent former broker and a former employee dumping shares) I am happy to hold for the three year EIS qualifying period (ends April 2017). By that time I think there is a very reasonable chance that the IPO shares purchased at 210p will be showing a decent profit.

please feel free to copy, paste, plagiarise etc should you wish to.

[timbo003] 02/6/2015 23:43

>>>>packman,
I was there, but won't get a chance to write anything up until Thursday (earliest), meanwhile other attendees may be able to oblige. I will just say though that I feel very comfortable with my investment going forward and (barring any unforeseen circumstances) I will definitely hold for the full 3 year EIS qualifying period.