Abstract
Wallenberg Initiative on Materials Science for Sustainability (WISE) is a Sweden’s largest ever research program to empower sustainable technologies with positive impact on our society through materials science and to train future leaders in society, industry, and academia. Clean energy, circular materials, reducing climate and environmental footprints as well as discovery of materials for novel sustainable technologies are the thematic areas that WISE aims to explore. In this context, my WISE project aims to develop ecofriendly, deformable, and biodegradable batteries by using plant-based organic materials to power electronics within the fast-growing areas of wearables and Internet of Things (IoT). The raw materials considered in this project are all-organic, bioderived and/or biodegradable, and will be processed mostly from aqueous solutions at room temperature or temperature <100 °C. Hence, the materials and manufacturing processes are cheap, easy to access, and ecofriendly. Since it is cheap and biodegradable, the device at the end of life can be easily disposed, either buried and decomposed or burned, which means that its waste would not be a big issue and that no energy is needed for dedicated collection or recycling. This technique will hence have a minimal environmental impact during the entire life cycle and will contribute to facilitate sustainable growth of IoT by replacing environmentally and economically problematic Li-ion batteries in small wearables, sensors, and signal devices. In this presentation, I will introduce WISE, its vision and strategy to promote a transition toward a sustainable society and discuss my previous and ongoing research work on plant-based deformable organic batteries as sustainable power sources for next-generation wearables and IoTs.
BioSketch
Nara Kim is an assistant professor in the Laboratory of Organic Electronics (LOE), ITN at Linköping University (LiU). She received a B.Sc. degree in Physics from Korea University in 2009 and a Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in 2016 (PhD Supervisor: Prof. Kwanghee Lee, PhD thesis title: Highly Conducting Polymers for Flexible and Transparent Electronics). After a year of postdoctoral training at Heeger Center for Advanced Materials in GIST, she joined LOE as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017 and continued research as a principal research engineer from 2019. During 2019 and 2020, she was also involved in the project with Ligna Energy AB, the energy solution company spin-off from LOE. She became an assistant professor in 2021 after receiving the Swedish Research Council (VR) Starting Grant. Nara is also a PI within the Wallenberg Initiative Material Science for Sustainability (WISE) and the Advanced Functional Materials (AFM) center at LiU. Her research interests include the structure–property relationship of organic electronic/ionic materials, and their applications in skin- or tissue-like energy harvesting/storage devices and bioelectronic devices.