The Truly Integrated Circuit Is Printed and Flexible
cPaper
Kimberley Clark is one of the latest to announce a smart substrate suitable for printed electronics. Its cPaper is paper impregnated with carbon rather than the more expensive carbon nanotubes and it can be used as heating elements, electrodes in printed supercapacitors and supercabatteries and in many other applications.
Organic impregnated conductive paper
In a different approach, the University of Uppsala in Sweden may be on the way to improved printed batteries.
It is developing a novel nanostructured high-surface area electrode material for energy storage applications composed of cellulose fibers of algal origin individually coated with a 50 nm thin layer of polypyrrole.
Results show the hitherto highest reported charge capacities and charging rates for an all polymer paper-based battery. The composite conductive paper material is shown to have a specific surface area of 80 m2 g−1 and batteries based on this material can be charged with currents as high as 600 mA cm−2 with only 6% loss in capacity over 100 subsequent charge and discharge cycles.
The aqueous-based batteries, which are entirely based on cellulose and polypyrrole and exhibit charge capacities between 25 and 33 mAh g−1 or 38−50 mAh g−1 per weight of the active material, open up new possibilities for the production of environmentally friendly, cost efficient, up-scalable and lightweight energy storage systems.