Researchers cut and assembled tiny solar cells on thin, flexible circuit boards before sealing them in a protective polymer to create a fiber-like strand that was woven with nylon into a small textile.
“Our vision is to develop solar harvesting fibers that can convert sunlight to electricity and battery fibers that can store the generated electricity in the textile.” The fiber batteries have also been designed to be equipped in a roll-to-roll fashion. This signified a departure from former methods due to the new approach delivering optimal utilization of active materials, low content of inactive materials, scalability, and compatibility with widely used battery industry equipment.
The battery equipment was custom-made into thin, scalable fibers employing a roll-to-roll process upon which the laminated flat strips of anode and cathode electrodes with a polymer separator into a stack. This was laser-cit into thin fibers. “We can process 100 meters of total fiber in a little over five hours,” articulated Jason Tiffany, an engineer at APL and co-author of the paper.