Optimized printing quality of battery electrode materials by laser-induced forward transfer

With the ongoing global warming energy storages as lithium-ion batteries gain more importance due to the increasing amount of generated current with renewable energies. To further boost the battery development with the focus of advanced materials and architecture the LIFT-process offers a direct digital additive manufacturing tool for fast prototyping. In this work the impact of the printing quality in dependency of the particle size was investigated with the focus of the depiction of the laser beam profile with single voxels. Since electrode inks commonly consist of materials with different particle sizes the edge quality of printed areas was analyzed in dependency of the distance between the coated slurry and the substrate and the glycerol content in the solvent mixture. In the latter study, it was shown that a certain solvent mixture exhibits an optimized edge quality for a certain distance.