Opening twisted polymer chains for simultaneously high printability and battery fast-charge

Y Wang and JL He and DX Cao and E Cakmak and XH Zhao and QL Wu and YY Zhao and HZ Ren and X Sun and Y Li and HL Zhu, ENERGY STORAGE MATERIALS, 55, 42-54 (2023).

DOI: 10.1016/j.ensm.2022.11.025

Fast-charging is key to the widespread adoption of battery-based electric vehicles. However, improving fast -charging through architecture optimization is expensive. To reduce costs and expand to commercialization, we applied roll-to-roll screen printing technology to create channels and decrease the tortuosity of electrodes. For the first time, this work successfully opened twisted polymer chains within high- solid-content inks to improve their screen printability and battery performance of as-printed electrodes. With LiNi0.6Mn0.2Co0.2O2 as active materials, the 60% solid content ink presents superior screen printability after opening the twisted binder chains. As-printed electrode exhibits 33% higher charge capacity at 6 C than printed electrode with chains twisted ink at mass loading of 6.5 mg/cm2. Furthermore, coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study the underlying mechanism systematically. The new ink preparation procedure provides a scalable, effective strategy for manufacturing screen-printable battery ink and promotes screen-printed electrode technology.

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