To address the quest of high-performance power sources that would comply with the requirements of the wearable electronic devices of the IoT era, we are working on new inorganic-organic thin-film materials for flexible energy harvesting and storage technologies. The combined ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition) and MLD (Molecular Layer Deposition) technique based on self-limiting gas-surface reactions of sequentially pulsed inorganic and organic precursor molecules is an elegant, yet industrially feasible way to fabricate such materials, as it enables the deposition of nanoscale hybrid coatings directly on sensitive/flexible/complex surfaces thus enabling the integration with e.g. textiles. We have developed novel ALD/MLD processes for an essentially “single-reactor-step” fabrication of fully functional thermoelectric and Li-ion battery structures. Our hybrid thermoelectric coatings consist of well-defined sequences of conducting nanoscale metal oxide layers and monomolecular organic layers; such a precisely layer-engineered structure provides us with the means to suppress the material’s thermal conductivity as a whole without hindering the electrical transport properties of the inorganic layers. Similarly, our all-solid-state Li-organic thin-film microbattery consist of a three-layer stack of ALD/MLD grown Li-organic anode and cathode layers and an ALD-grown LiPON electrolyte layer; such hybrid active materials contain light, abundant and environmentally benign elements only, and show very high specific capacities. Moreover, for our first proof-of-the-concept structure with ultrathin Li-benzoquinone cathode, Li-terephthalate anode and LiPON electrolyte layers, ultrahigh redox reaction rates were realized.

Atomic/molecular layer deposited inorganic-organic thin-film structures for energy harvesting and storage

256th National Meeting (2018)

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