Providing support for an emerging critical minerals industry in Australia is high on the agenda of the Australian Government, and it has chosen the Cooperative Research Centres Project scheme as a vehicle to do it.
Round seven of the scheme was to provide an extra $20 million for critical minerals projects. However, of the 16 funded projects announced in early August, there are only five that relate to critical minerals, and together they account for only around $10 million of the total of $30 million in funding.
The shortfall will made up for in the eighth round of the scheme, with again $10 million to be allocated to critical minerals projects, in addition to a $20 million funding package for projects that address reducing plastic waste and boosting plastics recycling.
Among the five successful critical minerals projects is a collaboration led by Australian bus manufacturer Volgren. Together with Deakin University and other partners, the company is developing a new next-generation electric bus for the global market.
Volgren has been exploring the zero-emissions vehicle market, and recently announced its first ever electric bus.
However, batteries have a much lower energy density than diesel fuel, and their weight therefore limits the capacity that can be built into the buses. It's a major constraint to the distance electric buses can travel without having to be recharged.
Volgren hopes that by producing a lighter bus body it can increase both range and capacity of its vehicles.
To this end, the CRC-P funded research will explore new and stronger alloys by adding small amounts of scandium, a rare earth mineral, to aluminium.
"The beauty of scandium is you do not need a lot in the material to make it a lot stronger," Deakin's Dr Thomas Dorin said in a university statement.
In 2017, Calix received an Australian Advanced Manufacturing Growth Fund award to apply its Calix Flash Calcination technology (CFC) to produce advanced materials for lithium ion batteries.
CFC can be used to make a wide variety of mixed metal oxide materials. It is based on a novel kind of kiln that produces mineral honeycomb, which are very highly active minerals. The process involves grinding minerals to very small nano-sized particles, which are then rapidly heated to high temperatures, and then snap frozen as a porous, honey-comb-like material in a high energy state.
“For example, we started with some cheap, agricultural-grade manganese carbonate and, using our CFC technology, created various controlled oxidation states of highly porous manganese oxide, a common lithium battery material,” the company’s chief executive Phil Hodgson explained the technology in 2017.
The now funded CRC Project will now explore the use of CFC technology “to produce customised micron sized nano-electroactive materials for intercalation-based anodes and cathodes. This would be integrated with optimised ionic electrolytes, developed with Boron Molecular and Deakin, to make batter up to 10 kWh battery pack prototypes at Deakin, through Bat-TRI-Hub.”
According to Deakin’s Professor Patrick Howlett, the unique properties of the CFC produced materials may also find use in in high performance ‘supercapacitors’, which are devices that can store electrical charge like a battery and then release that charge very quickly.
Also tagged as critical minerals project is a collaboration between Australian firms Calix Limited and Boron Molecular Pty Limited, and Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM).
The partners will receive $3 million to apply so called ‘honeycomb’ materials that are produced with technology developed by Calix to manufacture advanced hybrid batteries.
According to a statement from Deakin University, the project aims to reduce the cost and environmental impact of high performance batteries, ands to advance a sustainable battery manufacturing industry in Australia (see insert).
CRC-P funding for the three other critical minerals projects includes:
Apart from critical minerals projects, the seventh round of the CRC-P scheme funded projects across a broad range of industry-relevant areas with a total of around $20 million. They include: