Structured Electrode Additive Manufacturing for Lithium-Ion Batteries

As the world increasingly swaps fossil fuels, significant advances in lithium-ion batteries have occurred over the past decade. Though demand for increased energy density with mechanical stability continues to be strong, attempts to use traditional ink-casting to increase electrode thickness or geometric complexity have had limited success. Here, we combined a nanomaterial orientation with 3D printing and developed a dry electrode processing route, structured electrode additive manufacturing (SEAM), to rapidly fabricate thick electrodes with an out-of-plane aligned architecture with low tortuosity and mechanical robustness. SEAM uses a shear flow of molten feedstock to control the orientation of the anisotropic materials across nano to macro scales, favoring Li-ion transport and insertion. These structured electrodes with 1 mm thickness have more than twice the specific capacity at 1 C compared to slurry-cast electrodes and have higher mechanical properties (compressive strength of 0.84 MPa and modulus of 5 MPa) than other reported 3D-printed electrodes

Structured Electrode Additive Manufacturing for Lithium-Ion Batteries

As the world increasingly swaps fossil fuels, significant advances in lithium-ion batteries have occurred over the past decade. Though demand for increased energy density with mechanical stability continues to be strong, attempts to use traditional ink-casting to increase electrode thickness or geometric complexity have had limited success. Here, we combined a nanomaterial orientation with 3D printing and developed a dry electrode processing route, structured electrode additive manufacturing (SEAM), to rapidly fabricate thick electrodes with an out-of-plane aligned architecture with low tortuosity and mechanical robustness. SEAM uses a shear flow of molten feedstock to control the orientation of the anisotropic materials across nano to macro scales, favoring Li-ion transport and insertion. These structured electrodes with 1 mm thickness have more than twice the specific capacity at 1 C compared to slurry-cast electrodes and have higher mechanical properties (compressive strength of 0.84 MPa and modulus of 5 MPa) than other reported 3D-printed electrodes

Thermally Conductive 3D-Printed Carbon-Nanotube-Filled Polymer Nanocomposites for Scalable Thermal Management

Thermal transportation in a preferred direction is desirable and important for addressing thermal management issues. With the merits of high thermal conductivity, good chemical stability, and desirable mechanical properties, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have a great potential for wide applications in heat dissipation devices. The combination of 3D printing and CNTs can enable unlimited possibilities for hierarchically aligned structural programming. We report the formation of through-plane aligned multiwalled CNT (MWCNT)-filled polylactic acid (PLA) nanocomposites by 3D printing. The as-printed vertically (or through-plane) aligned structure demonstrates a through-plane thermal conductivity (k⊥) of ∼0.575 W/(mK) at 20 wt % MWCNT content, which is around 2.64 times that of a horizontally aligned structure (∼0.218 W/(mK)) and around 5.87 times that of neat PLA (∼0.098 W/(mK)) at 35 °C. Infrared thermal imaging performed on 3D-printed MWCNT/PLA heat sink verified the superior performance of the nanocomposite compared to that of the matrix polymer. In this study, we achieved the manufacturing of MWCNT/PLA with a high filler loading and a significant improvement in thermal conductivity simultaneously. This work paves the way to develop 3D-printed carbon filler-reinforced polymer composites for thermal-related applications such as heat sinks or thermal radiators