Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EN.MOTION (ENERSENS Motion to Thin Insulation)
Reporting period: 2022-02-01 to 2023-01-31
As the impact of transport and construction activities on the environment becomes increasingly important, thermal insulation materials are widely used. Their aim is to improve the thermal management and safety of electric vehicles and more specifically their battery packs, and to improve the energy efficiency of buildings. Several conventional insulation materials exist today. But a new generation of high-performance insulation based on silica aerogels, advanced materials, is about to revolutionize the market. But the problem lies in the cost of producing silica aerogel materials, which are too expensive to be adopted on a large scale and too complex to meet the size requirements of the markets. It is in this context, that Enersens has developed EN.MOTION: a continuous manufacturing process to create economical, ready-to-use and ultra-insulating ultra-thin film aerogel blankets (the Skogar® product). With EN.MOTION Enersens aims to become the leader in high performance insulation materials thanks to an innovative industrial process that drastically reduces production costs.
First period and so first year of the EN.MOTION project, was strongly dedicated to the pilot line which have to goal to prepare the scale-up production of the Skogar technology. Thanks to the knowledge and to the know-how of the key team members of Enersens, we have been able to setup a new pilot line in our plant facility and to start firsts trials on it.
This pilot line is composed by four separate zones to test the critical stages of our process, such as the sol-gel chemistry of our aerogels, the aging (structural reinforcement) of our aerogel, the hydrophobicity and the washing of our product, in a decorrelated way.
That pilot line had the required capacity to reach the different milestones and in particular 10m² production at a manufacturing capacity of 1m²/h and lately after technical improvement, 10m²/h capacity.
First key results on this pilot line are very promising. With our current batch process, our Skogar technology have a thermal conductivity of 0.012 W/(m.K) at 20°C and using our pilot line, we were able to reach 0.017 W/(m.K). This first performance is extremely positive because we know that we have many key parameters to work on to reach easily the initial targeted performance.
In parallel of this industrial topic, we started to work with key industrials players of the European battery market. In less than one year, we have created so many connections and so many partnerships: with giga-factory builders, with various battery pack manufacturers for all kinds of applications (cars, trucks, boats, drones, aerospace), and with big car manufacturers.
They are all testing and validating key properties of our innovative products for their applications.
This pilot line is composed by four separate zones to test the critical stages of our process, such as the sol-gel chemistry of our aerogels, the aging (structural reinforcement) of our aerogel, the hydrophobicity and the washing of our product, in a decorrelated way.
That pilot line had the required capacity to reach the different milestones and in particular 10m² production at a manufacturing capacity of 1m²/h and lately after technical improvement, 10m²/h capacity.
First key results on this pilot line are very promising. With our current batch process, our Skogar technology have a thermal conductivity of 0.012 W/(m.K) at 20°C and using our pilot line, we were able to reach 0.017 W/(m.K). This first performance is extremely positive because we know that we have many key parameters to work on to reach easily the initial targeted performance.
In parallel of this industrial topic, we started to work with key industrials players of the European battery market. In less than one year, we have created so many connections and so many partnerships: with giga-factory builders, with various battery pack manufacturers for all kinds of applications (cars, trucks, boats, drones, aerospace), and with big car manufacturers.
They are all testing and validating key properties of our innovative products for their applications.
Our priority targets, Innovators who are designing new high-performance batteries. Thought these key partnerships, the impact on the battery market is huge in term of safety. Indeed, our innovative product Skogar is extremely efficient in the thermal protection of batteries, especially against the propagation of thermal runaway. Thanks to our unique proposal, battery manufacturer can at the same time, increase the energy density of their batterie (and so the autonomy of the e-transport), as well as, increasing the safety of their systems while optimizing the weight and the volume dedicated to the solution for the thermal management. In other word, our Skogar solution is so thin and so efficient than only one or two millimeter is needed to reach these previous goals.
That type of technology is clearly accelerating the e-mobility in Europe thanks to ultra-safe batteries.
To access to a massive commercialization of this innovation, Enersens have planned to build an industrial line based on all the key parameters learn from the pilot line. This industrial line is the answer to deserve all European industrial actors of the battery. We will need to replicate as fast as possible this industrial scale-up tool to answer the need. To reach to target, Enersens is actively looking for key industrial partners which to goal of this collaboration will be to speed up the mass commercialization and so reach the status of leader of this technology.
That type of technology is clearly accelerating the e-mobility in Europe thanks to ultra-safe batteries.
To access to a massive commercialization of this innovation, Enersens have planned to build an industrial line based on all the key parameters learn from the pilot line. This industrial line is the answer to deserve all European industrial actors of the battery. We will need to replicate as fast as possible this industrial scale-up tool to answer the need. To reach to target, Enersens is actively looking for key industrial partners which to goal of this collaboration will be to speed up the mass commercialization and so reach the status of leader of this technology.