Pfenninger, Reto

Education

M.Sc. Materials Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2014.
B.Sc. Materials Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2011.

Publications

• Schweiger, S.; Pfenninger, R.; Bowman, W.J.; Aschauer, U.; Rupp, J.L.M.
  Designing Strained Interface Heterostructures for Memristive Devices
  Advanced Materials, 1605049 (2017)
• Aschauer, U.;Pfenninger, R.; Sverre, S.; Tor, G.; Spaldin, N.
  Strain controlled oxygen vacancy formation and ordering in CaMnO₃
  Physical Review B 88, 054111 (2013)

Patents

Fellowships, Awards and Honors

Hans-Eggenberger Prize 2015 for Interdisciplinary Electronic Engineering

Research

Reto Pfenninger is working on material development and assembly for all solid state Li-ion-based micro-batteries.
Most batteries used to date rely either on liquid or polymeric electrolytes which come with certain drawbacks like limited operation temperature and instability. These drawbacks motivate the development of new Garnet based all solid state Li-batteries in this project.

Special emphasis is also spent on the engineering of the interfaces between the different battery components involved. Dissimilarities in thermal expansion coefficients of the anode and cathode materials versus the electrolyte and various other interfacial effects can lead to ageing, delamination and degradation over time when the battery undergoes charging/discharging cycles. This aspect is as well being investigated with various electrochemical methods.

His project also includes the miniaturization of these solid state batteries in so called micro-batteries which can be integrated in CMOS fabrication processes on silicon wafers. This includes nano-fabrication in a clean-room facility where photolithography is performed to scale these components down to the micron scale.