Researchers print stretchable battery to light wearables

The stretchable Zn-Ag₂O rechargeable battery could power wearable fabrics.

Printable, stretchable, flexible battery technologies could enable wearable fabrics and stretchable LED displays to carry their own power source. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego recently demonstrated an example of a self-powered wearable that features a newly formulated Zn-Ag₂O rechargeable battery technology.

The current demonstration was described in detail in the journal Advanced Energy Materials (see All-Printed, Stretchable Zn-Ag₂O Rechargeable Battery via Hyperelastic Binder for Self-Powering Wearable Electronics). Authors included UCSD professors Shirley Meng and Joseph Wang, and doctoral candidates Rajan Kumar, Jaewook Shin, Lu Yin and Jung-Min You.

The technology is based on work done last year by Meng titled Deposition of ZnO on bismuth species towards a rechargeable Zn-based aqueous battery. There, she observed that zinc-based batteries react with the liquid electrolyte inside the battery producing undesirable zinc salts which, when reaching sufficient concentration, short-out the battery.

To read the full article, go to EETimes.