Clara Moldovan receives an Innosuisse grant
© 2021 EPFL
Clara Moldovan, a scientist in the Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering, has just received funding for her research entitled "SmartEnergy - Nanocarbon Energy Storage Integrated with Piezoelectric Energy Source for Smart Factory Applications".
With the funding received, 350'000 CHF for 18 months, the scientist, and Edwin Zea Escamilla, Senior Assistant at the Chair for Sustainable Construction at ETH Zürich, will work on a unique high density energy storage source based on a nanocarbon supercapacitor integrated with an energy harvester and electronics for a long-lasting, miniaturized and eco-friendly battery replacement. These research will open the way to clean, renewable and miniaturized energy sources enabling autonomous wireless IoT sensors in remote locations. It is a collaboration with ETH Zürich to perform life cycle analysis and assess the environmental impact of their solution and insure a green replacement of current batteries.
The project brings together 6 partners from 3 EU countries. The Swiss partners EPFL and ETH Zurich together with IMT-Bucharest, Renault Technologie Roumanie, Łukasiewicz Instytut Technologii Elektronowej and MEdbryt from Poland will work for a new piezoelectric energy source to replace conventional energy sources and significantly reduce the environmental impact.
Executive Summary
There is an increasing demand for clean energy and energy efficient autonomous integrated systems, attributed to the increasing adoption rate of wireless sensor networking (WNS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) for home automation, smart factories and control systems, which combine energy harvesting devices and sensors. In Switzerland, buildings use about 40% of the energy consumed per year, and account for over 25% of all CO2 emissions. Thus, improving builiding energy management would result in a significant impact.
The IoT market is emerging and expected to reach $5 billion by 2025 and forecasts predict more than 23 billion battery powered IoT devices in 2025. It is also emphasized that users of IoT devices would require a battery that lasts for more than 5 years and current battery technologies have severe limitations for this use case, they have a reduced lifetime and changing them yields high maintenance costs, they get degraded at low or high temperatures, limiting their use, pose safety issues and more importantly this has a huge negative impact on the environment throughout all the value chain, from metals mining to battery manufacturing.
This project is linked to an M.ERA-NET proposal, in which our role is to develop a energy storage solution based on carbon nanotubes hybrid supercapacitors capable of ultra-fast charging in just few minutes, while extending the lifetime by 30x (charging cycles) and using abundant, environmentally friendly materials. Moreover, our energy storage supercapacitor can be fabricated directly on chip and integrated with energy harvesters and electronics for a miniaturized, cost effective and efficient self-sustainable energy source for IoT. The integrated solution with energy harvester, storage and electronics on chips, has the potential to enable self powered, maintenance free, connected IoT sensor nodes and significantly reducing their costs and favour their adoption due to no CO2 emissions and environmentally friendly energy sources.