Multi-material integrated 3D printing of cylindrical Li-ion battery

A simple, low cost and highly efficient method of fabrication has always been the goal of manufacturing technology. In order to improve the speed of fabrication and simplify the preparation steps, this work proposes a multi-material integrated 3D printing method, aiming to obtain the desired structure from the print head in one step. As a typical example, a cylindrical Li-ion battery (LIB) with core-shell structure was integrally fabricated using this method. A multi-material print head is designed based on the structure to be printed. Special inks with the characteristics of non-Newtonian fluid for the LIB were developed. Anode, cathode, separator layer, and packaging layer were easily printed simultaneously, and the printing parameters were studied. Electrochemical performance of the printed battery was tested with the charge and discharge capacities of the printed battery up to 147 and 99 mAh g−1 at 0.1 C rate, respectively. The proposed multi-material integrated printing method greatly reduces the printing process and improves the fabrication efficiency. This system can be directly extended to fabricate other integrated devices such as supercapacitors. Based on this idea, it should also be possible to design different print heads to print other periodic structure in one step.