Electro-spraying/spinning: A novel battery manufacturing technology

Lithium-ion battery (LIB) industry seems to have met its bottle neck in cutting down producing costs even though much efforts have been put into building a complete industrial chain. Actually, manufacturing methods can greatly affect the cost of battery production. Up to now, lithium ion battery producers still adopt manufacturing methods with cumbersome sub-components preparing processes and costly assembling procedures, which will undoubtedly elevate the producing cost. Herein, we propose a novel approach to directly assemble battery components (cathode, anode and separator) in an integrated way using electro-spraying and electro-spinning technologies. More importantly, this novel battery manufacturing method can produce LIBs in large scale, and the products show excellent mechanical strength, flexibility, thermal stability and electrolyte wettability. Additionally, the performance of the as-prepaed LiFePO4||graphite full cell produced by this new method is comparable or even better than that produced by conventional manufacturing approach. In brief, this work provides a new promising technology to prepare LIBs with low cost and better performance. An integrated lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) were designed through a novel manufacturing technology combining electro-spraying and electro-spinning. The novel battery manufacturing method can produce LIBs in large scale, and the products show excellent mechanical strength, fexibility, thermal stability and electrolyte wettability. [Display omitted] •A new manufacturing technology using electro-spraying/spinning has been proposed to fabricate integrated LIBs.•The new manufacturing technique has potential to lower the cost of LIBs in the future and encourage additional research.