Multi-Material Integrated Three-Dimensional Printing of Cylindrical Li-Ion Battery

A simple, low-cost and highly efficient method of fabrication has always been the goal of manufacturing technology. In order to improve the speed of fabrication and simplify the preparation steps, this work proposes a multi-material integrated 3D printing method, aiming to obtain the desired structure from the print head in one step. As a typical example, a cylindrical Li-ion battery (LIB) with core–shell structure was integrally fabricated using this one-step multi-material integrated printing method. A multi-material print head is designed based on the structure to be printed. The inks with the characteristics of non-Newtonian fluid are developed for battery printing. Anode, cathode, separator layer, and packaging layer are easily printed simultaneously by coaxial wrapping layer by layer. The parameters of ink viscosity, printing pressure, and printing speed are studied. Electrochemical performance of the printed battery is tested with the charge and discharge capacities of the printed battery up to 147 and 99 mAh g⁻¹ at 0.1 C rate, respectively. Compared with the traditional step-by-step printing, the proposed multi-material integrated printing method realizes the one-step printing of the battery structure, which improves manufacturing efficiency. This system can be directly extended to fabricate other integrated devices such as supercapacitors. Based on this idea, it should also be possible to design different print heads to print other multi-material devices in one step.