Advanced Solid Energy Solutions for Wearable Electronics

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Wearable electronics, covering a very diverse range of products from smartwatches and headsets to medical sensing/monitoring patches to smart clothing and e-textiles, have become pervasive in our lives, providing us unprecedented convenience and at times even life-saving assistance. While wearable electronics have evolved from niche technologies to main stream necessities, they still need to break away from traditional electronics with new materials and form factors to make them truly portable and wearable. An area needing significant effort is energy, not only with respect to power supply but also regarding power consumptions. Advanced energy solutions require high performing and clean power sources as well as low-power driving circuits and components. The current obstacles to such energy solutions are: a) a lack of high energy density and high power density electrode materials; b) a lack of high performance, non-corrosive, benign, and environmental friendly solid electrolytes to minimize the packaging weight and volume and to enable flexible and wearable form factors; and c) a lack of a dielectric material in transistors to reduce driving voltage. Solutions should also exhibit long term stability and be able to survive the extreme Canadian weather conditions. The proposed research will enable required energy solutions by developing critical material building blocks for solid-state electrochemical energy storage (SEES) systems and for the gate dielectrics of printed organic field-effect transistors (OFET). A SEES device stores and delivers energy in the solid-state, providing safe, clean, and effective means to power next generation consumer and automotive electronics. Electrolyte-gated organic field effect transistors (EGFETs) have emerged as important building blocks for wearable bioelectronics and IoT devices due to their printability, flexibility, and potential for large-scale manufacturing. The proposed research will contribute to resolving pressing energy storage needs for wearable consumer electronics suitable to be deployed under severe environmental conditions such as in Northern Canadian climates. Leveraging the material building blocks successfully developed under previous grants, the scope of the proposed Discovery Grant is to further innovate on those novel material systems through sustainable and low-cost approaches for thin, flexible and light-weight SEES devices that provide high energy and power density and are safe to operate. We will tune polymer electrolytes from previous work and apply them to EGFETs to reduce operation voltage to sub 1V to ensure low power operation. Combining these innovations will lead to thin, flexible and lightweight devices that are critical enablers for the rapidly evolving wearable electronics.