LESIA · Laser Engineered Surfaces/Interfaces for Advanced Batteries

Addressing climate change is humanity’s greatest challenge in the 21st century. The European Green Deal has declared that Europe is committed to realizing a climate-neural society by 2050. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport, power, and industry sectors, Europe must urgently change the energy paradigm, shifting to renewables. However, renewables are all intermittent, and facing the storage challenge. Secondary batteries offer highly efficient electrical energy storage capability, and become the key technology to achieve the large-scale application of solar/wind green energy and thus support the deep decarbonization of European energy system. European Commission estimated that the value of battery industry can reach €250 billion by 2025. Existing battery systems still suffer from low energy density and safety issues. There is huge gap between commercial batteries and advanced battery proposed by BATTERY2030+. Employing novel electrode materials are considered as promising strategies to develop next generation high performance batteries. However, these high capacity electrode materials raise significant challenges (dendrite, volume change, and degradation etc.) in practical application, which limit their commercialization prospects. LESIA will develop and construct bio-inspired surfaces/interfaces with electrochemical functionalities for the components of batteries using laser-based fabrication and emerging nanoscale characterisation techniques. LESIA will develop new surficial chemistry, and regulate the decisive electrochemical interfacial processes, and thus address the challenges of the high performance anodes and cathodes for next generation advanced batteries. LESIA will create new paradigm of advanced battery development by using cutting-edge laser-based surface/interface engineering technologies.