Episode 37 – Part 1: Innovative Magnetic Concrete: Wireless Energy Transmission for Vehicles with Mauricio Esguerra from Magment

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: On today’s episode, we have Mauricio, who’s the CEO and co founder from Magment. So thank you for coming on today. 

Marcucio Esguerra: Hello, Matt. Very happy to be here with you today.

Matt Nally: That’s great to have you on. I suppose before we go any further, do you want to give us a bit of background as to who you are and what you do, and then we can, I can introduce what we’re going to talk about today.

Sure.

Marcucio Esguerra: My pleasure. So we founded this company based on a technology, which is magnetic concrete. So you may wonder what this is. It’s a concrete that has magnetic properties. And the reason why we make this technology is because that’s the best way to transmit energy. In most cases we go with transmission of wireless energy into vehicles.

So this concrete is being used. in order to help coils that are embedded in the ground or in a floor to make this energy transmission to vehicles. And those vehicles can be either at rest or in motion.

Matt Nally: Awesome. Awesome. I think many people have heard about this, so it’s going to be a very interesting episode going through this it caught my eye.

Cause my, my, my background, as I’ve mentioned, just before we started recording is I spent a bit of time learning about material science and and yeah, different materials coming to market and what they can do. So this caught my eye straight away. I suppose what got you into this area is my first question.

Absolutely. That’s

Marcucio Esguerra: really interesting. Actually, my co founder and I, we are both coming from materials, actually from magnetic materials. Okay. And in order to avoid the confusion, there is two different types of magnetic materials. There is the so called magnets or hard magnetic materials. And there is the so called soft magnetic materials, which are not magnets, but are magnetic only when they are exposed to a magnetic field.

Okay? Normally you would think of, for example, of iron. Iron is not a magnet, it’s just a soft magnetic material. So we we have been working on this kind of materials. However there is a special type of materials called ferrites. which are actually iron oxide materials, okay? And coming from that area we found a very interesting way of recycling materials like ferrites, and in order to be used as aggregates of concretes.

That’s where our idea came from. As a matter of fact, we both were working for Siemens. We are both based here in Munich, so Siemens is at the company here. That’s about 20 years ago, right? And so we found this possibility to combine the, let’s say, the recycling of this ferrite materials, of this conventional magnetic materials.

In order to make the aggregates of a concrete and make a complete new type of concrete using those aggregates. What I just explained, as you can imagine, is not only that we are combining two complete different fields, magnetic materials and concrete, but we are also doing this in the course of recycling, because everything that we make on our concretes is 100 percent recycled.

So that gives us a lot of issues about being very green and being fairly cost efficient.

Matt Nally: Oh very interesting. Just to introduce this topic then, so we’re going to cover how concrete can be used to recharge vehicles a title I never thought we’d have but I love it. And then part two, we’ll come on to the different applications of this sort of self charging concrete with, within the built environment and where it can be implemented.

But no, fascinating how you got into it. The, I suppose researching this topic before I messaged you about coming on, I noticed there are quite a few different concretes coming to market. So is it worth maybe coming on to just a quick overview as the sort of the different types of concrete that are coming to market?

And then we can focus in on this type of concrete specifically.

Marcucio Esguerra: Yes. I need to tell you, of course, I’m not a civil engineer. Actually, I’m a physicist, so what I know about concrete is to a good extent very much related to this specific type of concrete that we make obviously, and here’s the interesting thing we’re working very close to the largest cement companies worldwide.

Which are not only our partners, they’re also our investors. So we’re talking about companies like Holcim, which is the largest, or Cenex, the second largest. So those are the companies that we have been learning about concrete most of the time. But in fact, you’re right, you can make a lot of variations around concrete.

And look at this also for a better understanding. Concrete at the end of the day is a composite material. So you have a matrix, a binder, which is the cement. And you have aggregates, which can be very different things. And so you can raise a couple of different properties. So there is, for example let’s say, close to our technology, there is at MIT in the U.

S., there is technology developed to make concrete as a energy storage type of material, okay? And this is using not magnetic properties as we do, they are using electric properties. So this is one of these very interesting innovations. With many other let’s say, fields regarding also luminosity, regarding also let’s say, porosity in order to make certain type of applications on the road, and and many other things.

One of the most interesting things I’ve seen is the possibility to use 3D printing to make like bigger structures all the way to even houses out of 3D printing. So you see that the the enormous variety and I’m going to say something that probably you have already heard from other participants or yourself having said so.

Concrete is the second largest material used by humanity after water. Yeah, I imagine it must be, so it’s like the most used material ever by human mind. That means that you have a lot of possibilities and for us as a company, we are profiting from a hugely installed industrial base.

So that’s why we as a company don’t need to have all production. We can go to any pre casting company around the world to make our products. That’s a huge advantage as you can imagine.

Matt Nally: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think, yeah, just, just as an overview of the type of things I’ve seen, if you, when you mentioned the permeable concrete in terms of reducing flood risk and then glow in the dark and removing pollution, there’s so many different applications I suppose specifically with your concrete then.

It made up? You mentioned, obviously it’s re recycled electronic components, but does that all get formulated to produce something that can transmit electricity?

Marcucio Esguerra: Because we’re in a video, which is quite helpful, I will show you what a IDE is. Thread looks like this, so this is as I said, an iron oxide based material.

It’s something you could also call the ceramic material because it’s not metallic, it’s just ceramic, okay? You can have it in this kind of shape, that’s very popular in electronics. You can have it also in this way as a kind of a plate. So what we actually do is we buy all the scrap coming from production of these materials or the materials coming from e waste after the component have been used.

And what we do is actually take this as a bulk and just by by Using regular machines to crack them down into particles and using sieving to have different fractions. That’s how we can come up with a mix of these particles in a certain proportion, of course. In a certain in a certain fraction and so forth so that we can make at the end a a slab, a concrete slab, which normally would not only be the concrete slab.

It would also include a coil inside of the slab. So that means that we end up with a component, if you wish, which is a slab with an electric function. And this component can be installed Right now, our business is more related to warehouses, logistics, and charging vehicles like forklifts and robots. And you may ask yourself, why not cars?

Why not buses? Why not trucks? It’s related to the business, not related to the technology. You may ask, for example, how many forklifts are electric? About 75%. How many cars are electric? Less than 1%. So obviously, we go to the business where most of the vehicles are already electric. So that’s the reason why we are so engaged in working in this kind of applications where the, These slabs I was talking about are being embedded in floors, in factories.

So that’s basically how the application actually works.

Matt Nally: And how is it able to, or how well is it able to charge a vehicle as it’s driving along? Is it, does it keep it at its at its level of charge, or is it able to, increase the battery, um, to charge as it’s going along?

Marcucio Esguerra: As a matter of fact what you do is the vehicle has a receiver. So if you’re seeing, for example our phones today, our smartphones, they also have a receiver inside, so you can use it also with a charger. So the same is with these vehicles. Not all of them have the call already integrated, but you can retrofit it whenever that’s required.

So the vehicle moves around the factory and in certain portions of the floor, which are basically the wastes. with most of the traffic of these vehicles. In certain portions they will just drive on it, not doing anything more than going from A to B. That’s it. And they charge while they do so that means that the vehicle with that receiver passes through a collection of transmitter coils that are embedded in the floor.

And this way they pick up the part. Yeah, fascinating. It would, interestingly we’ve just done a record in an episode also on ESG in, in valuations economic, social no sustainability government and governance. Sorry. I imagine this type of material system built into a warehouse would increase the value of that property as well.

Matt Nally: On the basis that it’s. Basically can help keep the warehouse running more efficiently.

Marcucio Esguerra: Definitely. And of course we are talking about something that is brand new in two senses, not only our material, which is a very disruptive type of material, because you are changing categories.

You have concrete, which is a construction material. But it has a magnetic magnetic function, right? So that’s something that of course, as such, is already new. But the application of charging vehicles during motion is also a new type of application that has been enabled by Orca. So having said this, It’s of course the start of a new market.

These two disruptions, the material disruption and the application disruption is basically the challenge we’re working on. And in order to find the right type of users, the right type of customers for this, and we have been working with two major companies. I wonder if I should even try to share my window to show something here to make it visually a bit more appealing.

Otherwise, if that’s not possible, I just tell you about this. So we work with a company which is leading in the field of forklifts. which is Jung Heinrich. It’s a German company. I think most people have seen those yellow forklifts around us from this company, Jung Heinrich. This is the partner with which we have been able to develop this technology and to bring it to the end customers.

Going back to your question, if you think, for example, of a typical application, a so called cross dock, available port. It’s the place where the containers coming from a boat are being are being brought and distributed what it’s inside into some shelves. And then later on the trucks waiting at the other side are being loaded with what is there.

So the forklifts that travel around this crosstalk do bring this material from one side to the other. So for this kind of applications, we have been able with young Heinrich to find the corresponding customers. Companies like DHL or Ikea or Lidl, or you name it, that has this kind of operations.

And so the value to them is not just the property with that electric feature. It’s just bringing the operation to a completely different level, which means productivity. So you can imagine that for a company like, say, DHL, The only thing they cannot afford is vehicles standing in a corner, hooked at a cable, charging.

That is not productive. That’s downtime, right? So you want to have, you want to have those vehicles moving all the time around. And that’s what what this technology is about. And the second point, and I think it’s a very key feature here, is you can reduce the size of the battery.

Think about this. I have just here , small forklift. You can see that here, right? ? Yeah. So this small forklift in the right size of course would have a battery inside that can have a weight of about two tons.

Matt Nally: Yes. But it’s

Marcucio Esguerra: very heavy and very expensive battery. So what you want to do is to reduce the, especially the cost of this battery by taking only half or even a third of the size of the normal battery and just charging it all the time as it moves around.

Still then very productive, but the cost of the fleet. And the and the say, the ecological impact of a very big battery is heavily reduced because we all know these days. Lithium ion batteries as marvelous as they are are also creating some issues around the sustainability of getting those materials for making batteries.

So the less batteries you need, the more sustainable your operation is. So everything has been recognized throughout the industry, especially the logistics. So I hope that you excuse me the long answer to your short question, but I wanted to make the point that the value of our technology is really to enable this type of very sustainable and very economical operations.

Matt Nally: Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. I hadn’t thought about the the battery size aspect. So obviously that makes things much cheaper, but the I considered the uptime aspects. I’d watched a video recently on I think it was JCB and they’ve gone into hydrogen, obviously their stuff’s outside a lot of the time, but it means, yeah, but making sure that things can remain up the whole time rather than having to charge or whatever I suppose my final question before we can move into sort of applications.

What does the installation process look like? So I imagine it’s easier if you’re building a new warehouse, but can you also retrofit into existing warehouses?

Marcucio Esguerra: You can imagine that if you have a slab like this, that has been manufactured at a pre casting facility So it goes like with any kind of construction item, so you would bring those elements into the construction site.

And now you see that I’m talking about one particular case, which is when you are building a new a new warehouse, for example. So that you would furnish those slabs as the base of the floor. And you would put them domino stalls, one next to the other on the floor and then would cover that with whatever surface is being used in the operation.

So that’s the easiest way. And of course, those. Slabs containing the coals need to be connected to the electric system, filling them with power. I would say, to make things easier to understand, it’s not that different from, for example, a floor heating system. Even though this is not to heat, it’s to deliver power to the vehicle.

But the type of installation is very similar. So that’s one thing. However, we also have other cases where the building is already existing. It’s a bit of a challenge. To be honest not everybody would cut out a portion of the floor, not the whole floor, of course, only a portion.

Actually, it’s like one percent of the floor, it’s not a lot, but still people would be a bit reluctant. To doing that. So what we would do in those cases, and this is becoming very popular, is to put these slabs on the floor and accessing those with ramps. And so this idea has been extremely well received.

So that’s a product that we are selling under the name MacTop, because it’s on top of the floor, right? And this allows people to get used to it. To these two disruptions I mentioned at the beginning. The first disruption is Concrete with magnetic properties and electric function. And the second is inductive charging of a vehicle.

So this way people get familiar to that, they can move it to another place, they can play with this. And when when people are convinced or users are convinced of the benefits, they may consider them embedding them into the floor after a certain time. So that’s the, so you see that second installation is straightforward.

You just put the unit on the floor and connect it to the grid and that’s it.

Matt Nally: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s quite easy to at least try it out. I suppose my actual final question, because I’ve thought of another one you mentioned about obviously underfloor heating as an, as a comparable example, and that got me thinking about obviously I don’t know, heat waste effectively.

And what I mean by that is how efficient are the The panels that are converting electricity from, a grid to Thanks for

Marcucio Esguerra: this question because this is one of the most, uh, important ones. Wireless charging would not have any chance. To succeed if efficiency would be different or lower from cable chart.

Okay. And incredibly enough in the field where we are mostly working currently with forklifts and robots, we can even feature a higher efficiency. And we are talking here about efficiencies in the range between 92 to 95%. of the energy arrives at the battery of the vehicle. So that means that you hardly have losses.

Of course, you need to, when you think about you have a transmitter either sitting on the floor or under the floor, and you have a vehicle at a distance of maybe eight, ten centimeters or something like that. So you need to overcome this distance with the magnetic field. But and here’s the benefit of our technology.

We can shape these coils and the way that they are embedded into the magnetic concrete in a way that would maximize the efficiency. Like the coupling to the receiving coil. And this is how that is possible. And you will be surprised to hear that if we talk, if we take the specific case of a forklift, like this, where charging with a cable would require a very high current.

I don’t know how much the audience is familiar with current values, but to give you an idea, It’s 200 amperes would have to flow for this cable to charge this vehicle. So the efficiency of cable charging is actually lower than inductive charging because of the high current.

Matt Nally: Yeah. Yeah.

Marcucio Esguerra: And so we have a sort of specific advantages, but efficiency is always.

On, on the positive side. So we are never going to waste energy as compared to conventional charge.

Matt Nally: That’s yeah very interesting. Very interesting. I suppose my the last question I do actually want to ask, and I keep saying last question, which I’m good at doing is I just want to understand a bit more, about The material itself.

So I know you’ve mentioned there’s this sort of a coil effectively that that yeah, helps transmit the electricity, but also part particles of the sort of, yeah how does that, how’s that added into the material, between the sort of coil and the particles aspect. How does it work together to

Marcucio Esguerra: you need to think about a concrete slab.

Let’s say to make it simple one square meter and five centimeters in thickness, more or less.

Matt Nally: Yeah.

Marcucio Esguerra: Okay. And then you bring coils like this one. Can you see this? This is a coil.

Matt Nally: Yes.

Marcucio Esguerra: It’s a copper coil. And you bring this. And embedded into the fresh concrete, actually, it’s being done upside down.

Actually, you put the coil at the bottom of the mold, and then you pour the concrete on top of that. And when that’s ready, then of course you turn around and then you have the coil embedded and you see here, you have here the connection. And so you can connect it to deliver power. The vehicle would be having a smaller coil sitting somewhere.

That’s it.

Matt Nally: Yes.

Marcucio Esguerra: It’s very straightforward to make and very straightforward to operate.

Matt Nally: Fine. And the particles you mentioned, is that taking the particles and melting them down into a coil? Or no.

Marcucio Esguerra: Actually. Sorry. Maybe that was wasn’t clear. You make like with any concrete.

You make a mix. So that means that while you have the cement and the particles in a dry mix first, then by applying water, then you would create, so to speak the fresh concrete that you would pour it onto that. That’s it. So that means it’s if you would buy a ready mixed concrete.

Dry concrete, and just apply it yourself by only adding water. So that’s the basic idea. Of course, there is other ways of doing those mixes, but this is the most common one.

Matt Nally: Got

Marcucio Esguerra: it.

Matt Nally: Oh, interesting. I think it’s a fascinating material. We’ll move on to topic two, so join us for topic two.

And we can cover the applications of charging concrete within the built environment.