Additive manufacturing of flexible energy harvesting and storage device

Printing technology as an additive manufacturing method offers promising approach to deposit functional nanomaterials in a scalable fashion. Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) offer seemingly limitless, clean energy to power ever more increasing and complex wearable and pocket devices. The burgeoning field of wearable technologies, or body worn application- enabled computing devices, are capable of providing user feedback/alerts from multiple devices that continuously monitor metrics such as physical and muscular activity; cardiac and respiratory rates; as well as temperature, humidity, and light. The challenge of supplying continuous power in a non-invasive fashion to ever more complex and numerous wearable devices is a key prohibitive bottleneck to commercialization. A manufacturing process involved additive manufacturing is studied to highly-efficient thermoelectric generators to power wearable devices via body heat. Such wearable power generation would be of interest to a myriad of applications including those associated with particular fields of work/leisure efficiency (e.g., computing and communication devices that connect to the internet and supply requested information), biomedical monitoring (e.g., wearable sensors that monitor respiratory, muscular, and metabolism activity) and military applications (e.g., devices that alert the warfighter of nearby biochemical threats). On the other hand, supercapacitors have emerged as a promising energy storage device, due to their high power, long cycle life, and ability to bridge the energy and power gap between batteries and conventional dielectric capacitors. Supercapacitors are widely used in electronic systems where fast and frequent charging/discharging is required. Hybrid power sources integrating batteries and supercapacitors together provide both high energy and high power at the same time. Herein, we report for the use of DIW technology for printing fully packaged flexible supercapacitors