Researchers from Harvard and the University of Illinois created a lithium-ion micro-battery with 3D printer. These batteries the size of a grain of sand but they could sufficiently power miniature devices and is comparable to your cellphone battery.
To make the micro-batteries, the team used a custom 3D printer with a 1mm wide nozzle to deposit two separate lithium metal oxide pastes into comb-like shapes, which then hardened to create an anode and cathode. After adding an electrolyte, a sub-hair-width cell was created.
“Not only did we demonstrate for the first time that we can 3D-print a battery; we demonstrated it in the most rigorous way,” said Jennifer A. Lewis, senior author of the study and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS)
Those could someday be used in medical devices, small equipment or wearable electronics.
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