Spine-like battery may soon power flexible electronics: Here’s how it will work!

Scientists have developed a lithium ion battery shaped like the human spine that can power flexible and wearable electronics. The rapid development of wearable electronics such as smart watches, fabrics, glasses, sensors, and more has increased the demand for high-performance flexible batteries. Up to now, however, researchers have had difficulty obtaining both good flexibility and high energy density concurrently in lithium-ion batteries.

Researchers at Columbia University in the US developed a prototype battery shaped like the human spine that addresses this challenge. The battery allows remarkable flexibility, high energy density and stable voltage no matter how it is flexed or twisted, researchers said. “The energy density of our prototype is one of the highest reported so far,” said Yuan Yang, from Columbia University. “We’ve developed a simple and scalable approach to fabricate a flexible spine-like lithium ion battery that has excellent electrochemical and mechanical properties,” said Yang, who led the study published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Our design is a very promising candidate as the first- generation, flexible, commercial lithium-ion battery. We are now optimising the design and improving its performance,” he said. Researchers were inspired by the suppleness of the spine while doing sit-ups in the gym. The human …read more