With the rise of wearable electronic devices, flexible ultra-thin printed thin-film batteries have increasingly become a research hotspot for scientists. New technologies, including organic semiconductor thin film transistors, have emerged, but they cannot be applied to actual products due to limitations such as stability. According to the physicist organization network, a study published in the "Applied Physics Letters" recently proposed a new method for zinc manganese dioxide batteries. At present, many researches are devoted to improving the usability of organic semiconductor thin film transistors, but after hard work, people have found that such devices have low flexibility, long chemical bonds, and thick dielectric layers, which cannot meet the requirements of practical applications. Therefore, alkaline chemical batteries similar to zinc manganese dioxide have gained more attention.
One of the driving forces for the development of thin-film printed batteries is that they can be produced through production lines that manufacture the remaining components of flexible electronic devices, thereby improving integration and reducing production costs. Compared with lithium ion batteries, alkaline batteries have more environmentally friendly raw materials, do not need to be sealed, and cost less. In the manufacture of alkaline chemical batteries, stencil printing is used on the fiber substrate, which can be bent, can drive a flexographic printed circuit, and meet its required performance characteristics. In the new study, by using a special manufacturing process, researchers can connect 10 cells in series to form a series circuit with a peak voltage of 14 volts and a capacity of 0.8 milliampere hour. This new type of thin-film battery can use currently commercially available polyvinyl alcohol or polyethylene cellulose films as raw materials, and use a 100-micron thick film to isolate zinc and manganese dioxide electrodes and become its substrate. A hydrophobic fluoropolymer solution (Teflon AF) is printed between the two electrodes to reduce electrolyte migration and contact with other adjacent electrodes in the battery. Different unit cells are connected with silver-containing printing ink.
The researchers used a 100-kohm resistor to discharge the battery. After 7.5 hours of discharging the 0.8 mAh battery, the voltage dropped from 14 volts to 10 volts. In order to determine its performance in a real printed circuit, they also conducted a test similar to the actual use environment of the battery. The researchers used a simple circuit consisting of five inverters connected end to end for testing. The output of the circuit is very sensitive to the supply voltage and the delay of the circuit. The result shows that the voltage waveform of the circuit is kept at about 13 volts in the measurement with a unit of 10 milliseconds. After 20 minutes, no changes beyond this range were detected, which indicates that the new battery has a relatively stable power supply capacity. The researchers said that more complex circuits may require more energy to promote, but the new zinc manganese dioxide battery at least provides people with an alternative to the existing printed batteries.
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