Welcome!

The Printed/Electrochemical Energy Lab at the City College of New York is primarily focussed on creating and improving print processes for energy storage.

More than 90% of electrochemical storage cells (batteries) contain printed or slurry cast components. Printing process decouple materials synthesis and device fabrication, and allow for high throughput continuous manufacturing. This translates to the market place in higher quality, lower cost batteries. This decoupling has allowed researchers to improve the materials used in all electrochemical cells and enabled the batteries we rely on a daily basis to be both smaller and more energy dense.

Poorly understood (at a fundamental level), though, is relationship between the processing of printed electrodes and cell performance, regardless of materials choice. Printed electrodes, at the microscale/nanoscale, are a collection of packed particles bound typically by a polymeric matrix. Intimate contact between the active particles are critical for power performance, so industries simply "squeeze and can" these electrodes to improve power performance. As applications begin to require flexibility and longer cycle life, the standard calendaring (or compression) batteries undergo is either unavailable or detrimental in the long term, respectively.

At the PEEL we have created an environment where we can quickly print, test, and analyze battery electrodes. With our custom designed printers/stages, microfluidic fabrication and testing equipment, and in-lab prototyping tools we can quickly iterate on designs and experiments, starting with a "shotgun" approach to complex problems but developing both variable spaces and hypotheses of interaction after a few design cycles.

The lab's tooling and characterization equipment also enables research and training for

• Electrochemical Materials Processing
• Electroanalytic Chemistry
• Rapid Prototyping of Microfluidic Electrochemical Cells

Lasted Editted Thu Jul 29 17:56:48 2010