Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2022

Nuclear Batteries in Submarine Power Cables: Breaking the Wall of Century-Lived Power

Francesca Cova

2022 2022 Winner 2022 Winner | Emerging Talents Emerging Talents

There is a need to enable stable and persistent energy sources for integrated electronics and technologies operating in any strategic environment inaccessible to humans. Francesca Cova is developing a battery prototype based on the light-mediated conversion of radioactive decay energies into electricity, exploiting record-efficient scintillating nanoarchitectures.

Dr. Francesca Cova

University of Milano – Bicocca

Francesca Cova is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Materials Science at the University of Milano – Bicocca (Italy). She graduated 2016 (Physics) and earned her PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology in 2020, with a thesis on scintillating optical fibers. She is currently working on the development of the future generation of ionizing radiation detectors. Her research interests focus on new, fast, and radiation hard scintillating materials, with special attention on emerging technologies such as nanostructures and nanocomposites, including quantum dots, perovskites nanocrystals, semiconductor nanoplatelets and metal organic frameworks. She is the principal investigator of an innovative project funded by the Italian foundation University for Innovation, for the production of stable and long-lasting power by converting the radiation energy from nuclear decays.