A lithium Print

Built on a flexible substrate with the techniques of printing, this battery is thicker than experimental half a millimeter. This is the second time such a feat - promising - is successful in the laboratory. The novelty is that this is a polymer lithium battery, a well known family.

It is Japan that ultrafine flexible battery has been developed, at least at the prototype stage. Its designers are not academics and are short on details. Their work is part of an industrial research project scheduled until 2011 and comprising several large companies within a structure, AMIC (Advanced Materials Innovation Center), established a foundation for science, MIESC (Mie Industry and Enterprise Support Center), controlled by the government.

We know that the battery was performed using a printing technique on a flexible polymer substrate. Two models have been designed, providing a 2 volts, the other 4 volts. The techniques of printed electronics progressing fast enough and we know in fact that can be applied on a surface of the electrolyte layer and insulation forming a battery in which electrodes are formed by the two sides of the sheet.

This is also not a first. Last summer, a team from the Fraunhofer Institute, one of Reinhard Baumann, Chemnitz, Germany, had already made an ultrathin flexible battery using printing techniques. In the German model, was the anode and cathode zinc manganese.

The battery flexible project AMIC. On the left, a room of 100 yen (22.6 mm) gives the scale. © Nikkei Electronics

A process industrially

Japanese researchers, they have used a polymer (a plastic material so) impregnated with electrolyte, which serves to channel the lithium ions. The result is a lithium-polymer, variation of the lithium-ion battery, which is already small thicknesses.

The refinement of the prototype Japanese is much better: they are thicker than 500 microns, a value similar to that of the German prototype. But the Japanese say they can do better. Indeed, the printing technique used is that of the laboratory, but Japanese researchers said, on an industrial scale, it would be possible to use the presses roll, which would achieve a much lower thickness.

As an application, designers imagined example of such batteries to stick-on sheets of photovoltaic cells. This produces a device that would serve both to produce an electric current and store. But one of the missions of these manufacturers is to find alternative outlets for lithium battery pack thin and flexible.

Reference: http://free-pressrelease.org/2012011136145/a-lithium-print.html