Future Days Battery Edition recap: Crystalline engineering revolutionizes solid-state micro batteries

by Malvern Panalytical, Thursday, 18th September 2025

Future Days Battery Edition recap: Crystalline engineering revolutionizes solid-state micro batteries

On May 21, Malvern Panalytical hosted the Future Days: Focus on Battery virtual event, featuring a range of speakers from across industry and academia. Read on for a recap of Professor Dr. Mark Huijben’s session on advanced thin-film micro battery technologies.

Looking for the video? Watch the recording of this session and more from Future Days: Battery Edition here.

Summary and Q&A

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The University of Twente’s energy storage research spans the entire battery value chain across multiple expertise areas, including the development of micro batteries. These ultra-miniaturized power sources are designed for emerging applications in 5G communication, Internet of Things devices, environmental monitoring, security systems, medical applications, and wearable electronics like smartwatches.

Professor Huijben’s session focused on the unique materials science challenges and breakthrough solutions for solid-state micro batteries. Unlike the batteries powering electric vehicles, micro batteries require complete miniaturization while maintaining long cycle life, chip integration capability, and intrinsic safety. The market potential is substantial, with predictions of rapid growth exceeding USD 1 billion within just a few years.

Early micro battery efforts produced bulky solid-state devices unsuitable for chip integration. Thin-film battery structures, measuring just microns in thickness, enable true on-chip integration through advanced thin-film processing technologies. Still, current thin-film designs face a critical limitation: their amorphous solid-state electrolytes, typically lithium phosphate (LiPON), while functional, are not structurally optimized for maximum ionic transport. Huijben’s team developed an approach that replaces amorphous electrolytes with crystalline materials, which provide ordered pathways for lithium-ion transport, enabling much faster ionic movement and higher power capabilities.

The key innovation is epitaxial engineering – precisely aligning crystal structures across different materials and optimizing the interfaces between them. This approach prevents degradation processes that typically occur at material boundaries, dramatically boosting energy storage performance. The combination of self-assembly fabrication with atomic-level structural control offers a sophisticated solution to the micro battery challenge through scalable manufacturing processes.

Below are key questions and answers from the session:

Where do you expect thin-film batteries to be used first?

Medical devices and electronic devices represent the most promising early applications, though initial deployment will likely focus on distributed sensors requiring small amounts of energy rather than more complex applications like human implants.

Could these batteries eventually reach mainstream applications like electric vehicles?

While these specific micro-scale approaches target different applications, the knowledge gained from thin-film studies transfers to larger bulk systems. Through collaboration with industry partners, insights about degradation mechanisms and interface optimization can be applied to powder-based systems through advanced coating techniques, potentially impacting larger-scale applications indirectly.

How did you develop this crystalline engineering approach?

Pulsed laser deposition has existed since the 1980s for creating well-defined films across various applications. The decision to focus on battery materials came about eight years ago, recognizing that battery materials involve complex multi-element systems (nickel, cobalt, manganese) plus volatile lithium – perfect applications for a technique excelling with complex materials requiring high structural control.

What technology readiness level has this research achieved?

University research typically focuses on the lowest TRL levels to remain at the innovation forefront. For micro batteries, the examples shown are probably at TRL 4-5 levels, not yet close to industrial scale implementation.

You can watch the recording of this session and more from Future Days: Battery Edition here.

Further reading:

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