Printing batteries

Five years ago Christine Ho, UC Berkeley grad student, set out to reinvent the battery. Contemporary technologies did not meet her needs, small size and low environmental impact, so she turned to the oldest battery technology we know: zinc. Zinc-oxide-based electrochemical cells make up the majority of our "disposal" batteries because they are cheap and efficient. But they are disposable -- these cells form deposits on the electrodes that decrease the cell's usability with time. Ho's solution was to... well, change the solution. To be specific, she replaced the typical zinc battery's liquid solution with a conductive polymer, and found that the results were astounding. She could recharge her new type of battery hundreds of times, make the cell arbitrarily small because of no need to house chemicals, and best of all, print it using standard printing manufacturing techniques. It's even flexible, too.