Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don't last long before needing recharging.

Comments

Re:Shaped batteries for cars

[drinkypoo]

He mentioned that one limiting problem with big packs (ie - electric vehicles) is heat dissipation. He opined that if you could make "shaped" cells you could put many of them in the interstitial spaces in a vehicle, [...] So maybe you could put shaped batteries inside a drone frame, or a curved battery as part of a watch band. Anyone know more about this?

I know for sure that you wouldn't put the batteries into the empty spaces in the unibody, because you would compromise crash safety and you'd also create a maintenance nightmare. You also want to centralize the mass in the center of the vehicle as much as possible for a variety of reasons, spreading it out throughout the body would be the opposite of that.

The idea of making watch band batteries is a good one. The idea of putting batteries into the empty spaces of the car's body is not.