Thinnest and highly resilient electrodes for safe flexible electronic systems

With the unprecedented advancements in the internet of things (IoT) for infrastructure and medical technologies for healthcare and wellness, the number of IoT sensors will likely surpass 1 trillion by 2050.

Here, flexible sensors have tremendous potential in IoT for real-time health monitoring 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-intelligent sensing with machine learning, the flexible electronics market can surpass 70 B$.

Flexible electrodes are central to all flexible electronic applications and vital for creating all flexible components, such as solar cells, batteries, capacitors, antennas, logic, and sensing circuits. However, usual materials, such as metal or indium tin oxide films, are not only thick, rigid, and brittle.

They also involve rare or toxic metals and hazardous means of processing, isolation, and recycling.

In this project, at the Ångström laboratory, we will employ atomically thin sustainable materials of naturally occurring abundant materials like graphene and other graphene-like materials to realize flexible electrodes through novel dry lamination techniques and efficient micro-3D printing techniques, which will pave the way for eco-friendly flexible electrodes for electronic and energy systems.