Maarit Karppinen awarded ERC-PoC Funding

The European Research Council has awarded Aalto University’s Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, Maarit Karppinen, 150 000 euros Proof of Concept (PoC) funding for the development of transparent and flexible 3D Li-organic thin-film microbattery.

The need for integrating energy storage in various electronic devices, such as smart cards, RFID tags, medical devices, wireless sensors, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, is growing fast. The proposed all-solid-state thin-film microbattery possesses a number of potentially highly attractive characteristics, including transparency, flexibility and safety.

Schematic illustration of flexible and transparent all-ALD/MLD Li-organic battery.

Within the project, Professor Karppinen together with her research team aims to design and construct an all-ALD/MLD (atomic/molecular layer deposition) Li-organic 3D microbattery and to identify the most potential applications for early commercial use of the technology. The project builds on recent strong scientific discoveries and ALD/MLD process development efforts by the research group. The ALD/MLD method allows conformal coating of complex high-surface-area micro-architectures needed to improve the energy and power density of a thin-film battery.

This ERC-PoC project is also strongly linked to the CloseLoop project headed by Professor Karppinen and funded by the Strategic Research Council where novel sustainable material candidates are developed and evaluated from the viewpoint of circular economy for high-end applications such as the Li-ion battery.

Further information:
Aalto Distinguished Professor Maarit Karppinen, maarit.karppinen@aalto.fi
PhD student Mikko Nisula, mikko.nisula@aalto.fi
Dr. Pertti Kauranen, pertti.kauranen@aalto.fi