T wo major trends are changing the way batteries are designed. First, small portable electronic devices have steadily evolved toward compact and thin form factors while retaining high levels of device functionality. As a result of this trend, batteries have become an everincreasing fraction of the total device volume, as shown in Fig. 1. Second, the advent of truly manufacturable and scalable flexible electronics has lifted the dimensional limitations of device design. However, this has in turn introduced new design complexities for integration, processing, and reliability. Connecting and integrating a battery, which oftentimes is the largest component in an electronic device, poses complex manufacturing, cost, and reliability issues. These technology progressions have motivated a shift in energy storage design and manufacturing to accommodate novel materials, new device geometries, and non-traditional fabrication methods. Additive manufacturing (AM) is a suite of manufacturing processes that is currently changing the way we design and manufacture products.1 AM technology will lead to a revolution in the way energy storage components are designed, integrated, and utilized in electronic devices. In this article we focus on recent advances in additive manufacturing for batteries and highlight current and future research directions for battery design, manufacturing, and integration for small, portable, and wearable electronics.
Conventional Large-scale Battery ManufacturingAdvances in batteries are following typical process scale and efficiency trajectories. Batteries, such as the lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells found in smartphones, typically contain four main elements: a positive electrode, a negative electrode, a liquid electrolyte, and polymer-based separators. Focusing on the anode and cathode, traditional fabrication methods use ink-like materials (referred to as slurries) to form the electrode films. The slurries are formed by mixing electrode materials and conductive additives with binders for adhesion. This slurry is then spread onto a foil in a slot die or blade coating machine.Slot die or blade coating is the standard method for depositing battery electrodes in industry. In this process, a slot die head or blade is set a fixed distance from a current collector substrate. In large-scale production, the substrate moves, the head/ blade is fixed, and material is continuously injected onto the moving foil and is evenly distributed over the current collector. The head/blade typically resides about 5-200 µm above the current collector substrate where smaller gap distances may result in imperfect applied films after drying, and larger operating gaps may result in uneven surfaces. The final thickness of the dried electrode depends on the concentration, morphology, viscosity, and surface chemistry of the ink or slurry. This coating process has been used successfully at scale for many years to fabricate battery electrodes, however, there is no inherent capability to pattern shapes or nonrectilinear features into this e...