PARC redesigns printers to produce solar panels, batteries - serranopentagess

lithium ion printing — A printed atomic number 3 ion battery.

They say inspiration bathroom come from the most unlikely places. For a man of science at the Palo Alto Search Mall, the Xerox-owned science laborator in Silicon Valley best known as PARC, it came from a tube of toothpaste.

The result is a new manufacturing method that can help make star panels more economic and increase the energy denseness of batteries.

It began when the lab was looking at ways it could use existing Xerox technology, like printing, in other areas. Patc watching the way the two or three materials help shape each other when they are squeezed through a toothpaste tube nozzle, an applied scientist had one of those "a-ha" moments.

By squeezing through a print honker a silver paste surrounded by a sacrificial material that would eventually get burned off, researchers found they were able to incur a very fine silver line—and in electronics, any typecast of fine, conducting line is usually good.

The sacrificial material shapes the silver American Samoa it comes out of the nozzle so the sequent metallic communication channel is 50 microns wide and 30 microns broad (a micrometer is a thousandth of a millimeter)—fractional the breadth and three times the height achieved when depositing silver connected its own, said Scott Elrod , V.P. and director of PARC's hardware systems lab where the work is beingness done.

"Then this is a solar prison cell," aforesaid Elrod, showing a reporter a prototype made with the technology. The cubicle is covered with narrow grid lines that carry power but also dwell connected circus tent of the photovoltaic material that converts wanton into electrical energy. Better silver lines intend less of the solar cell's rise up is canopied and that means more power can be generated.

"You can gues a cardinal megawatt production installation," Elrod said. "You overleap in that kind of of printing technology in place of the conventional screen printing process and you're up to a hundred and iii, hundred and four, hundred and Little Phoeb megawatts and the cost for this technology is same standardized to what it is for the conventional screen impression."

The system is already in archetype production with an unnamed solar cadre maker. PARC hasn't finished in that location. The same technology is being tried stunned in atomic number 3 ion batteries, which sit at the heart of electrical cars, power tools, laptop computer computers and a myriad of other portable electronic gadgets.

Producing denser batteries

Batteries generate electricity through an negatron flow between a cathode and anode. The PARC researchers take been using their co-extrusion technology to have small channels in the cathode that allow the lithium ions to penetrate deeper.

"By doing that you can make the electrode thicker and as you make it thicker you basically make the Energy Department density for the whole barrage fire higher," Elrod said. "So instead of going a hundred miles on an electric fomite electric battery you can maybe go down a hundred and twenty miles. We think that the improvement is along the parliamentary procedure of 20 percent."

The barrage fire is still in the research stage, but the company has already get upward with some prototype button cells. PARC is hoping the technology will be hired in electric machine and power tool markets first.