Ilika Plc Regulatory News (IKA)

Ilika plc

("Ilika" or the "Company")

Successful Factory Acceptance Test

Ilika (AIM: IKA), the accelerated materials innovation company, announces that the pilot line for the production of prototype batteries has successfully completed its factory acceptance test (FAT). The completion of this FAT is in line with the timing announced by the Company on 1 July 2014.

On the 18 July 2013 Ilika announced that it had entered into an industrial partnership with the University of Southampton to design, build and operate a solid-state battery scale-up facility. The capital investment is being funded by a £3.3 million grant awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is managed by Ilika's Chief Scientific Officer, Professor Brian Hayden.

As part of its contribution to this partnership, Ilika has supplied expert personnel to design the equipment and supervise the FAT, which recently took place at the fabricators in Finland. During this test, the functionality of the equipment was demonstrated and tested as a pre-condition to packing and shipping it for installation in the UK. The University of Southampton has made an additional investment of ca. £750,000 in state-of-art laboratory infrastructure in readiness for the installation and operation of the equipment.

The equipment will be shipped for installation and commissioning in Southampton in Q4 2014, after which work will commence to prepare pre-production quantities of solid-state batteries in 2015 for evaluation by commercial partners around the globe.

Graeme Purdy, CEO of Ilika, commented: "This successful FAT represents a significant milestone in the commercialisation of our solid-state battery technology. The pilot line will not only enable Ilika to make its unique stacked solid-state batteries in sufficient quantities for commercial validation, but it will also deliver valuable data for the economic modelling of its proprietary manufacturing process."

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