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2009
Conference Paper
Titel
Print technologies based manufacturing of electrical energy sources for smart systems
Abstract
Today electronic applications have become ubiquitous and may be found in all areas of daily life. The recent years' trend of miniaturization implicated an overall reduction in weight, size and thickness of electrical consumers. These requirements may as well be transferred to mobile energy supplies, such as primary and secondary batteries. Not only to meet today's demands, several approaches have been developed to manufacture batteries by the use of printing technologies. The printing of electrical energy sources as a part of the manufacturing process offers numerous advantages. Printing technologies are characterized as technologies with high throughput, reproducibility and applicability for highly efficient mass production in connection with low costs. The use of printing technologies results in a high flexibility not only related to the use of substrates, which might be paper, plastic foil or textiles. Shape, size and layout of printed structures are variable as well and may be exchanged very quickly. The promising connection of printing and electrical energy sources therefore offers many opportunities regarding the manufacturing of low-cost mass products. The highest potential is most likely the development of new applications, e.g. smart cards and tags, lab-on-chip systems or even 3D smart objects which are provided with printed energy sources. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of manufacturing primary and secondary electrochemical energy systems. With the help of the investigations on printed primary batteries a basis for the development towards a roll-to-roll production has been established. Manufacturing techniques comprising the direct integration of products or product lines may be progressed in the near future. Furthermore, the transformation of all battery components into printable elements is one of the next steps in the further development of printed batteries. A connection of printed batteries with consumers, e.g. sensor or RFID applications should be aspired as well. The results regarding RAM batteries show a general possibility of manufacturing of printed secondary systems. Further steps to take are improvements in performance and interaction of the used materials.