Imagine Intelligent Materials receives Defence Innovation Hub contract

One of Australia’s leading graphene sensing companies, Geelong-based Imagine Intelligent Materials Limited, was awarded one of the Defence Innovation Hub contracts announced earlier this month by the Minister for Defence Industry, Melissa Price MP.

Imagine will receive $271,000 to explore and develop applications utilising advanced materials in military body armour that, if successful, will enhance the safety of Australian Defence Force members and reduce maintenance costs.

Chris Gilbey, CEO and Executive Chairman of Imagine said, “Our primary focus continues to be on the development of large-scale surfaces that sense, communicate and deliver valuable information.”

Imagine is the leading developer of graphene-based sensing in the world. It is developing large scale sensing solutions for smart buildings and cities and its subsidiary company, in Finland, develops signals processing hardware and algorithms to generate data from its sensing surfaces.

This integrated approach enables Imagine to deliver the industrial sensing equivalent of the human skin, in an extremely cost-effective way, enabling valuable data to be generated in real time from large surfaces.

Imagine was founded in 2014 by Chris Gilbey and Phil Aitchison and is the lead industrial partner in Graphene Certification Labs, based at Melbourne’s Swinburne University. It was also the first Australian company to build a commercial-scale graphene manufacturing capability.

The Defence Innovation Hub contract announcement came shortly after the announcement of an investment by Japanese Internet of Things (IoT) company, Asteria, in Imagine Intelligent Materials. Asteria and Imagine plan to develop a hybrid point-based and surface sensing platform. Imagine Intelligent Materials’s large scale surface sensing technology will be integrated with Asteria’s “Gravio” IoT middleware product for both Japanese and global industrial users.