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Merck

A Foldable Lithium-Sulfur Battery.

ACS nano (2015-09-29)
Lu Li, Zi Ping Wu, Hao Sun, Deming Chen, Jian Gao, Shravan Suresh, Philippe Chow, Chandra Veer Singh, Nikhil Koratkar
ABSTRACT

The next generation of deformable and shape-conformable electronics devices will need to be powered by batteries that are not only flexible but also foldable. Here we report a foldable lithium-sulfur (Li-S) rechargeable battery, with the highest areal capacity (∼3 mAh cm(-2)) reported to date among all types of foldable energy-storage devices. The key to this result lies in the use of fully foldable and superelastic carbon nanotube current-collector films and impregnation of the active materials (S and Li) into the current-collectors in a checkerboard pattern, enabling the battery to be folded along two mutually orthogonal directions. The carbon nanotube films also serve as the sulfur entrapment layer in the Li-S battery. The foldable battery showed <12% loss in specific capacity over 100 continuous folding and unfolding cycles. Such shape-conformable Li-S batteries with significantly greater energy density than traditional lithium-ion batteries could power the flexible and foldable devices of the future including laptops, cell phones, tablet computers, surgical tools, and implantable biomedical devices.

MATERIALS
Product Number
Brand
Product Description

Sigma-Aldrich
1-Methyl-2-pyrrolidinone, ReagentPlus®, 99%
Sigma-Aldrich
1-Methyl-2-pyrrolidinone, ACS reagent, ≥99.0%
Sigma-Aldrich
1-Methyl-2-pyrrolidinone, biotech. grade, ≥99.7%
Sigma-Aldrich
1-Methyl-2-pyrrolidinone, anhydrous, 99.5%
Sigma-Aldrich
Sulfur, 99.998% trace metals basis
Sigma-Aldrich
Sulfur, flakes, ≥99.99% trace metals basis
Sigma-Aldrich
Sulfur, powder, 99.98% trace metals basis