Thin film technology for energy storage media
Due to the large internal surface area of porous materials, the focus is on energy conversion applications such as super capacitors or innovative anodes for lithium-ion batteries.
These techniques follow four pathways called thin-film battery technologies . The mechanism of the thin-film batteries is that ions migrate from the cathode to the anode charging and storing absorbed energy and migrating back to the cathode from the anode during discharge and thereby releasing energy .
Applications for thin film batteries include: RFID tags, wireless sensors, medical devices, memory backup power, batteries for extreme high and low temperatures, and energy storage for solar cells and other harvesting devices. Manufacturing challenges, especially reduction of cost, are being addressed by current development efforts.
Several efforts have lead to low temperature fabrication of thin film batteries on polyimide substrates, but the battery capacity and rate are lower than those treated at high temperatures.6,7 For the battery anode, many designs use a vapor-deposited metallic lithium film as both the anode and current collector.
For very small battery areas, <1 mm2, microfabrication processes have been developed.2 Typically the assembled batteries have capacities from 0.1 to 5 mAh. The operation of a thin film battery is depicted in the schematic diagram (Fig. 2).
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