A flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery. (Credit: UC San Diego)

A team of researchers has developed a flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery with a 5–10 times greater areal energy density than state of the art. The battery also is easier to manufacture; while most flexible batteries need to be manufactured in sterile conditions, under vacuum, this one can be screen printed in normal lab conditions. The device can be used in flexible, stretchable electronics for wearables as well as soft robotics.

The new battery has higher capacity than any of the flexible batteries currently available on the market. That’s because the battery has a much lower impedance — the resistance of an electric circuit or device to alternative current. The lower the impedance, the better the battery performance against high current discharge.

The printed battery cells were recharged for more than 80 cycles, without showing any major signs of capacity loss. The cells also remained functional in spite of repeated bending and twisting. The battery’s exceptional energy density is due to its silver oxide-zinc (AgO-Zn) chemistry.

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 Nanoengineers at UC San Diego have developed a flexible battery with 10 times more energy than standard Lithium ion batteries The device will be a contender for the next-generation power source for consumer electronics including IoT devices The battery is rechargeable, biocompatible and has a high power and energy density that make it a perfect fit for the wearables market The battery is manufactured using screen printing under normal conditions and by contrast, most lithium flexible batteries need to be manufactured in a sterile environment under vacuum Researchers showed the battery could power a flexible display system

    00:00:41 equipped with a microcontroller and Bluetooth modules and the battery did better than commercially available devices The battery is based on a silver-oxide-zinc chemistry and it can provide 5 to 10 times more power than a typical Lithium battery for the same surface area The breakthrough was made possible using a proprietary technology from a California-based battery company called ZPower and by using special inks and characterization techniques developed by UC San Diego nanoengineers UC San Diego nanoengineers and ZPower are now working

    00:01:17 on a cheaper, faster charging battery for 5G devices and soft robotics