Project title: Thinnest and highly resilient electrodes for safe, flexible electronic systems
Main applicant: Venkata Kamalakar Mutta, Division of X-ray Photon Science
Grant amount: 3 000 000 SEK
With the never-before-seen advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) for infrastructure and medical technology for healthcare and wellbeing, the number of IoT sensors will likely exceed 1 trillion by 2050. Here, flexible sensors have enormous potential within IoT for real-time health monitoring on wearable devices, packaging materials to improve supply chain management, and building materials (walls, floors) for intelligent buildings with automatic environmental conditions for energy efficiency. With this growing need for autonomous sensing with machine learning, the flexible electronics market could exceed $70 billion. Flexible electrodes are central to all flexible electronic applications and crucial for creating all flexible components, such as solar cells, batteries, capacitors, antennas, logic, and sensing circuits. However, everyday materials like metal or indium tin oxide films are not only thick, rigid, and brittle, but they consist of rare or toxic metals. They are processed, isolated, and recycled using hazardous methods. In this project, at the Ångström Laboratory, we will use atomically thin sustainable materials based on materials abundantly found in nature, such as graphene and other graphene-like materials. This is to create flexible electrodes through new dry lamination techniques and efficient micro-3D printing techniques, paving the way for environmentally friendly flexible electrodes for electronic and energy systems.
