A screen-printing method for manufacturing of current collectors for structural batteries
Journal article, 2021

Structural carbon fibre composite batteries are a type of multifunctional batteries that combine the energy storage capability of a battery with the load-carrying ability of a structural material. To extract the current from the structural battery cell, current collectors are needed. However, current collectors are expensive, hard to connect to the electrode material and add mass to the system. Further, attaching the current collector to the carbon fibre electrode must not affect the electrochemical properties negatively or requires time-consuming, manual steps. This paper presents a proof-of-concept method for screen-printing of current collectors for structural carbon fibre composite batteries using silver conductive paste. Current collectors are screen-printed directly on spread carbon fibre tows and a polycarbonate carrier film. Experimental results show that the electrochemical performance of carbon fibre vs lithium metal half-cells with the screen-printed collectors is similar to reference half-cells using metal foil and silver adhered metal-foil collectors. The screen-printed current collectors fulfil the requirements for electrical conductivity, adhesion to the fibres and flexible handling of the fibre electrode. The screen-printing process is highly automatable and allows for cost-efficient upscaling to large scale manufacturing of arbitrary and complex current collector shapes. Hence, the screen-printing process shows a promising route to realization of high performing current collectors in structural batteries and potentially in other types of energy storage solutions.

Multifunctional

Current collectors

Energy storage

Battery composites

Author

Wilhelm Johannisson

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

David Carlstedt

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Awista Nasiri

Airbus Group

Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH)

Christina Buggisch

Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH)

Peter Linde

Airbus Group

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science

Dan Zenkert

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Leif Asp

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Göran Lindbergh

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Bodo Fiedler

Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH)

Multifunctional Materials

23997532 (eISSN)

Vol. 4 3 035002

Subject Categories

Textile, Rubber and Polymeric Materials

Materials Chemistry

Other Chemical Engineering

DOI

10.1088/2399-7532/ac2046

More information

Latest update

1/19/2022