Critical Resources (ASX:CRR) prints cathode, electrolyte and conductor in one 15-micron pass

The hardest interface in a solid-state cell just got built during manufacture instead of pressed together afterwards

Critical Resources (ASX:CRR) has reported a solid-state battery milestone that, on paper, looks dry and technical. Strip away the language and what the South Dakota School of Mines team has done is build the cathode, the solid electrolyte and the electronic conductor of a battery in a single room-temperature spray pass. No solvents, no drying ovens, no furnaces.

The deposited layer is roughly 15 microns thick, made of LFP cathode, an LLZO reference electrolyte and a carbon-nanotube conductive network, all sprayed onto aluminium foil in one step. SEM images confirm the layer is dense and uniform, with the electrolyte distributed evenly rather than clumped.

Why that matters comes down to the join between cathode and electrolyte. That interface is widely cited as the single biggest cause of solid-state cell failure, because you are normally trying to press two finished, rigid layers together and hope they bond.

CRR’s dry supersonic deposition (DSD) process forms that interface during the build itself. Combined with the company’s separate 3.2 mS cm⁻¹ amorphous electrolyte result last month, both halves of the solid-state problem are now showing tangible lab progress.

The licensing model is what gives this milestone investment weight

CRR is not trying to build a battery factory. The stated model is to develop and license process and materials IP to cell makers, with provisional patents filed on the new dry-deposition work under the CEPS framework.

That matters because a licensing-only player needs every milestone to do one specific job. It has to de-risk the IP enough that a defence prime, aerospace integrator or data centre cell maker would pay to use it.

A single-step, solvent-free deposition that also embeds carbon nanotubes is exactly the kind of capability NASA’s SABERS program has already validated as a desirable manufacturing architecture. CRR is now in the same conceptual neighbourhood.

What the announcement is careful not to claim

We think CRR has been unusually disciplined in framing this result, and it is worth flagging what is NOT being claimed. The electrolyte used in the composite layer is LLZO, a well-known reference material, not the proprietary 3.2 mS cm⁻¹ amorphous electrolyte (ASE) the company benchmarked in May.

Depositing the ASE itself by DSD is a later step. Standalone electrolyte deposition still requires feedstock conditioning, and coin cell electrochemical testing only just commenced using a liquid electrolyte as a baseline reference.

In plain English, the manufacturing process now works for the composite layer with a reference material, but full integration of CRR’s own electrolyte into a pouch cell built by DSD remains the prize.

Form-factor freedom is the under-discussed angle for aerospace

There is a secondary feature of DSD that has barely been priced in. Because the process deposits active material directly rather than assembling fixed-format cells, it can in principle build batteries to the geometry of the host platform.

Think structural batteries inside an airframe rather than rectangular cells bolted into a battery bay. For high-altitude solar UAVs, satellites and long-endurance defence platforms, removing battery mass and thermal-management hardware is a direct performance gain.

A licensee buying a process that conforms to platform geometry is buying something materially different from a cell vendor. That is the kind of differentiation that earns process IP a royalty rather than a commodity price.

The Investors Takeaway for Critical Resources

Today’s result is meaningful precisely because of the May electrolyte benchmark. Without 3.2 mS cm⁻¹ on the materials side, a clever deposition process is interesting but not investable. Without DSD, the electrolyte result was an academic benchmark with no industrial path. Both numbers now exist, but they have not yet been combined in a single cell.

What investors should watch over the next two quarters is, first, standalone deposition of an electrolyte-only layer by DSD, and second, the coin cell results currently underway. Either milestone meaningfully advances the IP package CRR intends to license, and a miss on either pushes the integrated story further right.

Investors can read our coverage of CRR’s earlier electrolyte benchmark at stocksdownunder, which sets up exactly why today’s manufacturing step is the right second move.