Haydale Graphene Industries PLC (LON:HAYD) Chief Executive Officer Ray Gibbs caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their recent invention for heatable articles, a long term pipe testing facility, a number of research grants and their importance to the group
Q1: You’ve made a number of announcement in the last couple of weeks, one of which was a second invention out of your agreement with Swansea University which is a nano material-based heatable articles. Ray, can you explain what these are and their potential applications?
A1: I suppose everyone has been listening to or watching the Rugby Six Nations, when someone gets sin-binned they come off the field, they cool down, muscles get a bit tight so if you can put a heated clothing around the legs and arms you maintain the muscle integrity and that reduces the issues for strains and damage and that’s just one application we’re are looking at doing, there’s other things in terms of heated body warmers and the likes for extreme arctic and Antarctic conditions. This actually is one aspect of the whole wearable technology arena where recently the research company BCC announced that, from their research, graphene should be in a position to have a market value of around $2 billion by 2020 and wearable technology is just part of that.
Q2: Now you also announced a long term pipe testing facility at your composites business HCS, what’s the significance of that?
A2: That’s actually starting to look at some long term planning which we have in the oil and gas industry, we want to bring in thermoplastic composite pipes for a steel replacement. We think they offer a better alternative, their cheaper and longer lasting and putting graphene in there is important but it needs a long term pipe testing facility which we’ve developed and we’re one of very few in the country , if not the world, to have one of these. It takes about 10,000 hours to go through the pipe testing for the American Petroleum Industry regulations so this is a very important piece for us but it’s a longer term plan and it’s being funded by the Leicestershire City Council and the European Regional Development Fund. So very important but much longer term and something that offers us a big opportunity going forward.
Q3: This morning you’ve announcement a number of research grants, can you explain what these are for?
A3: Yes, there are five of them actually so we’ve been busy in this area and it’s a very important part of the longer term pipeline that we’re developing, excuse the pun on the pipes! We’ve got a number of awards, they’re research grants funded primarily from the government which is an important part of growing our technology and growing the graphene space in the marketplace because it does need to grow. We’ve got some things like conductive advanced adhesives for aircraft structures, we’re looking at doing some work in aircraft leading edges and wings for de-icing prospects and then there’s also things for making filaments, nets and filtration which is water filtration and the we’re also going into wear resistance and thermal cycling for epoxy resins to improve durability. These are very very important everyday things in the marketplace and we’re also looking at doing high performance break systems which could impact on a range of different activities across the marketplace and these are all with very high profile organisations such as Meggitt and so on. It’s actually a means for us to work with some very very high profile and large organisations and demonstrate what Haydale Graphene Industries can do with them.
Q4: Sounds very exciting. How important are these grants to the group?
A4: They are a significant part of what we do, they are the longer term pipeline, we’re focussed on some short term sales in our composite markets and our conductive links but they are very much an, if you like, added into the pipeline piece for the ongoing future of Haydale Graphene Industries PLC. From that perspective, the support from the government that we’ve got for these grant awards is very good, it’s very crucial, it enables us to continue to invest in people and our infrastructure and from our perspective, yes exciting times and offers us new exciting products going forward.
