A manufacturing process for an energy storage device using 3D printing

Abstract

3D printing has been widely applied in the development of prototypes. The main advantage of this process is that the objects or products can be viewed in three dimensions on a computer display and a 3D sample can be created before committing to a large production run. There are various 3D printing technologies that are capable of manufacturing metal, ceramic, plastic substrate and paste objects. Recently several research groups have focused on the fabrication freedom of 3D printing for different purposes including freeform manufacturing of electrochemical devices but this use is still limited. This paper describes a manufacturing process for electrochemical supercapacitors using the combination of the two techniques of 3D printing which are Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) and a Paste Extrusion system. The method relies on creating a frame for the energy storage device, i.e. supercapacitor, by the FDM 3D printer and then depositing the conductive layers and electrodes of the supercapacitor using Paste Extrusion system. A 3D supercapacitor has been made and evaluated in this study.