At long last, hard work and grit paid off for Arwa – her first
lead authored journal paper in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology as invited
paper!
Free-form Flexible
Lithium-Ion Microbattery
Arwa T. Kutbee, Mohamed T. Ghoneim, Sally M. Ahmad, and Muhammad M. Hussain
Abstract—Wearable electronics need miniaturized, safe
and flexible power sources. Lithium ion battery is a strong candidate as high
performance flexible battery. The development of flexible materials for battery
electrodes suffers from the limited material choices. Previously, complexity
associated with LIB integration, miniaturization, low yield, low throughput and
safety issues have hindered potential for fully flexible lithium ion battery. In
this work we have shown an integration strategy for a flexible thin film
battery with an anode which serves as same as the current collector, referred
to as ‘’Lithium-free’’ LIB. The thin film stack can withstand soldering
temperatures (200 oC) and avoids the lithium metal dangers. Such a
free-form flexible lithium-free LIB is attractive because it is non-cytotoxic
and safe to be implemented in medical applications (including in-vivo
and in-vitro) for IoE and wearable electronics. Our device first
approach with the complete removal of the sacrificial Si (100) substrate and a
newly developed transfer scheme gives a flexible LIB with small size.
Additionally, our approach for a flexible battery is advantageous owing to its
compatibility with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) etching
processes, high yield production and ease of handling of fragile flexible
samples. The battery showed an enhanced normalized capacity of 146 µAh/cm2
at a rate 130 µA/cm2 (1C).
Way to go!