Tirupati Graphite plc has entered into a research collaboration agreement with the Department of Material Sciences and Engineering at Monash University, Victoria, Australia ('Monash') to develop commercial applications for a range of graphene products in raw and recycled polymer nanocomposites and dispersions. The Company has signed a 12-month research collaboration agreement with Monash to develop industrial products of graphene in polymers by enhancing thermal, electrical, and mechanical properties of thermoplastics, and thermosets for dispersions, performance coatings and smart skin applications using GO and rGO. Notably, the GO and rGO will be manufactured by the Company at its Graphene and Mintech Research Centre, which is focused on graphene manufacturing and applications development, advanced materials development and mineral processing technology development. The research collaboration will target certain applications, for example graphene enhanced recycled plastic railway sleepers to improve their mechanical properties using recycled plastics; this particular application is in collaboration with the Monash Institute of Railway Technology. In addition, the research will target the development of smart coatings (i.e., protect, monitor, and heal) using vitrimers and other polymers for graphene enhanced corrosion protection, which has applications for marine and structural steel, defence and many others. Graphene dispersions can be used as the raw input in multiple polymers and paints manufacturing, fast-tracking adoption of the Company's graphene products in industrial polymer composites and paints for an array of applications across industries including acoustics, defence, transportation, aerospace, automotive and more. Furthermore, development of smart skins and coatings will help address markets where corrosion is a challenge by improving the longevity of materials such as structural steel. Monash has extensive expertise and high-end facilities for fabrication and characterization of nanocomposites, characterization and quantification of corrosion, manufacturing and characterization of vitrimers, polymers, structural health monitoring techniques, materials testing and characterization facilities amongst others providing the capability to research and develop the target products from this collaboration. Data from the tests carried out by Monash will be correlated with the electro-thermo-mechanical improvement of the nanocomposites to further optimise the manufacturing process of GO and rGO from the Company. Under the terms of the research collaboration agreement, the Company will provide its zero-chemical GO and rGO, along with related technical support to the Monash research team, which shall undertake the following activities amongst others: Full thermal and mechanical characterization; Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) to measure Tg (heat capacity at glass transition) and heat capacitance; Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) to determine the degradation temperature of the selected resins in order to avoid degradation during the manufacturing process; Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) to study their viscoelastic behaviours; Measurement of the electrical conductivity; and Standard tensile tests up to rupture.