Cymat Technologies Ltd. announced that it has entered into a component development agreement with a global automotive manufacturer (“OEM”).
Cymat, together with its design partner Tesseract Structural Innovations, Inc. (“Tesseract”), has been retained to re-design a structural element (14 parts) within an existing electric vehicle (EV” battery enclosure. By integrating SmartMetal—Cymat’s proprietary aluminum foam—into the component, the new design is expected to optimize performance by reducing weight, improving crash resistance, minimizing manufacturing complexity and creating cost savings for the OEM. This opportunity is the culmination of almost a year’s work of exploring potential solutions for the OEMs challenges with EV battery enclosure systems.
Conceptual design & performance verification
The first phase of the agreement stipulates the completion of conceptual design together with the verification of performance through computer simulation. Subsequently, Cymat will be required to produce physical prototypes for the OEM to validate these simulation results. Once physical crash testing by the OEM is successfully completed and other production/pricing-related issues agreed to, Cymat expects to receive a serial production contract.
As this component is common to a number of vehicle platforms and would be treated as a running change, the potential volume of SmartMetal together with the compressed timeline to production, management views this opportunity as being transformational for Cymat.
The OEM has also indicated an interest in having Cymat/Tesseract evaluate other elements of their battery enclosure for performance enhancement.
Cymat’s CEO Michael Liik commented, “This has been a long time coming and I am excited that Cymat has finally broken into the automotive sector. Our material is ideally suited for the complex challenges faced by EV manufacturers. Consequently, we are now seeing interest from numerous auto parts companies and auto manufacturers around the world. This development contract vindicates our strategy of focusing on electric vehicle battery enclosure performance—an area still very much in its infancy.”
