In the 1970s, researchers lay on the bean bag chairs of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) at Xerox and designed inventions that later triggered the information technology revolution. Computer mouse, icons, "Windows" operating system, Ethernet and laser printers are all born here. Now, although those beanbag chairs have long since ceased to exist, PARC was also separated 10 years ago as an independent subsidiary, but its researchers once again conducted experiments on printing. This time, they all hope to develop new technologies and contribute to the 21st century clean energy revolution.
PARC's Hardware Systems Laboratory is developing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles that can store more than 20% more electricity than traditional batteries. Making a battery that can store more power requires a larger cathode that contains more lithium ions. However, the thicker the cathode, the slower the movement of ions. This will reduce the performance of the battery and cause slow acceleration.
PARC hopes to use two kinds of materials to construct the cathode to avoid the above-mentioned trade-off problem: one method is to use optimized dense storage materials, and the other is to use a porous material that can promote rapid charge transfer. Wide storage areas and narrow conductive areas alternate. This makes it possible to construct a larger, more energy-intensive battery without losing power.
People have known this basic idea for some time. The problem is to build a small enough area (about 100 microns for storage media and 10 microns for conductors). The cathode of a typical electric vehicle battery requires hundreds of thousands of such staggered fingers. To construct such a minute function and accuracy requires lithography technology, which is a very costly technique and is not suitable for manufacturing large-scale batteries with high speed and high capacity.
The PARC researchers' solution was inspired by the color bar toothpaste, which will surely impress predecessors of their freedom of thought. In PARC's new battery, two materials are mixed with an organic material to form a paste that is then fed into a printhead containing tiny channels and nozzles.
The print heads are moved to metal foil and the paste is extruded and arranged in rows to form fine stripes. The substrate is then dried to remove most of the organic material leaving only one solid cathode. In a test of the same type of battery in which the moving cathode is made of a material, the squeezable rechargeable battery can store 1/5 of the power. Scott Elrod, head of the lab, said that at the moment, PARC is meeting with companies that may eventually make the new battery to discuss how to test the battery.
Printing the cathode in this way is only the beginning. Currently, PARC is working with the U.S. government agency Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to try to print the entire battery. (The agency is responsible for creating advanced energy technologies.) This will require five pastes, two each for the cathode and the anode, plus one separator. By printing a silver wire that can draw current out of the battery, the squeezable battery is also expected to increase the efficiency of the solar cell. Simultaneously with the silver paste is a material that burns when the battery is heated.
As a result, the wire length is only 20 microns instead of 50 microns. This narrow line casts less shadow, so more sunlight can shine on the battery.
Now that solar panels made using this method have been put into production, Elrod has turned its attention to fuel cells, supercapacitors (a novel way of storing electricity) and even catalytic converters, which may also be made Squeeze the battery. The squeezable battery may never become a household word, such as laser printing, but Xerox will certainly be happy to see the old PARC's vitality.
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