Art form, nanotechnology combine to advance batteries

(Nanowerk News) A combination of nanotechnology and the traditional art of paper folding, known as origami, could be a key to a significant step toward improved battery technologies.
Arizona State University engineers have constructed a lithium-ion battery using paper coated with carbon nanotubes that provide electrical conductivity.
Using an origami-folding pattern similar to how maps are folded, they folded the paper into a stack of 25 layers, producing a compact, flexible battery that provides significant energy density – or the amount of energy stored in a given system or space per unit of volume of mass.
foldable battery
The above image illustrates the architecture of a foldable lithium-ion battery ASU engineers have constructed using paper coated with carbon nanotubes. They began with a porous, lint-free paper towel, coated it with polyvinylidene difluoride to improve adhesion of carbon nanotubes and then immersed the paper into a solution of carbon nanotubes. Powders of lithium titanate oxide and lithium cobalt oxide – standard lithium battery electrodes – are sandwiched between two sheets of the paper. Thin foils of copper and aluminum are placed above and below the sheets of paper to complete the battery.
Their research paper in the journal Nano Letters ("Folding Paper-Based Lithium-Ion Batteries for Higher Areal Energy Densities") has drawn attention from websites that focus on news of technological breakthroughs.
The researchers have also developed a new process to incorporate a polymer binder onto the carbon nanotube-coated paper. The polymer binder improves adhesion of the structure’s active materials.
The achievements open up possibilities of using the origami technique to create new forms of paper-based energy storage devices, including batteries, light-emitting diodes, circuits and transistors, says Candace Chan, who led the research team.
Chan is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Energy and Transport, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.
Fellow ASU engineering faculty members, associate professor Hanqing Jiang and assistant professor Hongyu Yu, have played leading roles in the work.
We have also covered this work in our Nanowerk Spotlight series here: Nanotechnology researchers fabricate foldable Li-ion batteries.
Source: Arizona State University