title: A Foldable Lithium-Sulfur Battery.
abstract: The next generation of deformable and shape-conformable electronics devices will need to be powered by batteries that are not only flexible but also foldable. Here we report a foldable lithium-sulfur (Li-S) rechargeable battery, with the highest areal capacity (∼3 mAh cm(-2)) reported to date among all types of foldable energy-storage devices. The key to this result lies in the use of fully foldable and superelastic carbon nanotube current-collector films and impregnation of the active materials (S and Li) into the current-collectors in a checkerboard pattern, enabling the battery to be folded along two mutually orthogonal directions. The carbon nanotube films also serve as the sulfur entrapment layer in the Li-S battery. The foldable battery showed <12% loss in specific capacity over 100 continuous folding and unfolding cycles. Such shape-conformable Li-S batteries with significantly greater energy density than traditional lithium-ion batteries could power the flexible and foldable devices of the future including laptops, cell phones, tablet computers, surgical tools, and implantable biomedical devices.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Jiangxi Key Laboratory of Power Battery and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology , 86 Hong Qi Road, Ganzhou 341000, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Zi Ping
authors.initials: ZP
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto , 5 King's College Road, Toronto M5S 3G8, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Jiangxi Key Laboratory of Power Battery and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology , 86 Hong Qi Road, Ganzhou 341000, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Deming
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Shravan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suresh
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chow
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto , 5 King's College Road, Toronto M5S 3G8, Ontario, Canada.|Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Toronto , 184 College St, Suite 140, Toronto M5S 3E4, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Chandra Veer
authors.initials: CV
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.forename: Nikhil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Koratkar
keywords: carbon nanotubes; foldable battery; lithium−sulfur battery; shape conformality