Gravure Printed Conversion/Alloying Anodes for Lithium-ion Batteries

Recently, printing techniques are increasingly investigated in the field of energy storage, especially for the fabrication of custom-designed batteries. Thanks to its many advantages, the most industrially used gravure printing would offer an innovative boost to printed battery production, even if, to date, such a technique is still not well investigated. In this study, for the first time, gravure printing is successfully used to prepare high-performance conversion/alloying anodes for lithium-ion batteries. A multilayer approach allows obtainment of the desired mass loading (about 1.7 mg cm$^{-2}$), reaching similar mass loadings to those obtained by commonly used lab-scale tape-casting methods, allowing for their comparison. High-quality gravure-printed layers are obtained showing a very high homogeneity, resulting in a high reproducibility of their electrochemical performance, very close to the theoretical value, and a long cycle life (up to 400 cycles). The good results are also due to the ink preparation method, using a ball-milling mix of the powders for disaggregation and homogenization of the starting materials. This work demonstrates the possibility of using the highly scalable gravure printing not only in the industrial manufacturing of printed batteries, but also as a useful tool for the study of new materials.