A fluid battery, the consistency of toothpaste, is being developed to meet the requirements of the next wave of wearable technology.
Researchers from Linköping University, in Sweden, have used electrodes in a fluid form to develop a battery that can take any shape.
Assistant Professor Aiman Rahmanudin said the soft and conformable battery could be integrated into future technology in a completely new way.
“The texture is a bit like toothpaste. The material can, for instance, be used in a 3D printer to shape the battery as you please,” Assistant Professor Rahmanudin said.
He said it was estimated that more than a trillion gadgets would be connected to the Internet in 10 years’ time.
“In addition to traditional technology such as mobile phones, smartwatches and computers this could involve wearable medical devices such as insulin pumps, pacemakers, hearing aids and various health monitoring sensors, and in the long term also soft robotics, e-textiles and connected nerve implants,” he said.
Assistant Professor Rahmanudin said if such gadgets were to work in a way that didn’t hinder the user, new types of batteries needed to be developed.
“Batteries are the largest component of all electronics. Today they are solid and quite bulky. But with a soft and conformable battery, there are no design limitations. It can be integrated into electronics in a completely different way and adapted to the user.”
He said previous attempts to manufacture soft and stretchable batteries had been based on different types of mechanical functions, such as rubbery composite materials that could be stretched out or connections that slid on each other.
“But this does not deal with the core of the problem – a large battery has higher capacity, but having more active materials means thicker electrodes and thus higher rigidity.
“Here, we’ve solved that problem, and we’re the first to show that capacity is independent of rigidity,” Assistant Professor Rahmanudin said.
Read the full study: Make it flow from solid to liquid: Redox-active electrofluids for intrinsically stretchable batteries.
