Integrated Computational Materials, Process and Product Engineering – IC-MPPE 2022

Advances in the miniaturization of electronics and manufacturing methods have empowered wearables with extremely fast processing capabilities while reducing their size at the same time. It has led to the widespread adoption of wearables in everyday consumer devices, various industrial applications, and personalized healthcare & remote diagnostics. With the increased computing power of wearable electronics along with the need to maintain a connection with the internet, the energy demand for wearables has significantly increased. The physical size of the energy storage elements cannot be accordingly increased to cope with the higher power requirements as it is limited by the intended application. Wearable devices, especially in health care and industrial maintenance applications, also desire and benefit from structural flexibility. An optimal solution to power the modern wearables is to i) discover novel printable materials to form higher energy density storage devices, ii) use advanced printing methods to increase energy power density or enable structural flexibility of current energy storage devices, and/or iii) develop methods and materials to form highly efficient energy harvesting devices. Here, we present an insight into the state-of-the-art printing methods (3D printing, inkjet printing, screen printing, electrohydrodynamic printing,) used to print novel materials for the creation of energy harvesters (triboelectric nanogenerators, solar cells, RF antenna-based, thermoelectric energy generators, and piezoelectric energy harvesters) and energy storage devices (electrochemical batteries, biochemical batteries, and supercapacitors).