Roll-to-Roll Screen-Printed Monolithic Supercapacitors and Modules With Varying Electrode Areas

Abstract

Monolithic supercapacitors (SCs) were fabricated using roll-to-roll (R2R) screen printing. The printing process was utilized for various layouts, in which the electrode area was changed for different SC cells and modules. A common fabrication method for SCs is to assemble stacked structure by different layers. Another fabrication method requires a planar interdigitated electrode (IDE) structure, in which the SC can be fully printed on a single substrate. However, a more novel approach is to use a monolithic structure, which represents a stacked structure. The monolithic SC is printed layer-by-layer on a single substrate but is not restricted to the IDE structure enabling larger capacitance and lower equivalent series resistance (ESR). In this work, the monolithic SCs were successfully fabricated from R2R by screen printing. The printed SCs include individual cells and modules with cells in series. All SCs had varying electrode areas to achieve different capacitances and to determine if the area affects to the yield. The smaller area was observed to better prevent the contact through the separator. However, the modules had more variation in the cells, even with smaller electrode areas.