Vladimir Egorov and colleagues from the University of Cork in Ireland believe that the batteries of the future will be manufactured using 3D printing. That writes Technology Review online in "Is 3D printing the future of battery design?". The researchers have investigated various new printing techniques for batteries and see them as an opportunity to produce a new generation of smaller, more powerful devices. "If they can be printed in order to integrate seamlessly into the product design for aesthetic reasons as well as for reasons of comfort or functionality, the standard battery with the bulky and firm form factor does not have to be taken into account during product development", say Egorov and Co.
So far, battery manufacturers have been wary of trying new approaches to avoid performance degradation. Therefore, many of the improvements were tiny and incremental. But materials scientists have started experimenting with 3D printing to print electronic circuits using polymer inks and a silver polymer for conductive traces so that soldering is no longer required. In this way, circuit boards can take almost any shape and even be part of the device structure. And until now, the need to produce conventional batteries with fixed sizes and shapes has been a major limitation, 3D printing of batteries should also make this easier. The researchers published their results on the publicly accessible science portal arXiv,
More on this in Technology Review online in:
(Vsz)
. (TagsToTranslate) 3D printer (t) batteries (t) Material Science (t) Maßscheidern
