New printable batteries

An article:
[www.isa.org]
Some guys in Germany created a battery via screen printing. Not a whole lot of technical info, but unless the layers really need to be that thin (.05 mm if I recall from screen printing class) a syringe type head should be able to print batteries fairly straight forwardly. The Zinc-Manganese reaction is from our old friend the original dry cell carbon core battery. The good news here is that the unit can be sealed, unlike the zinc air cell the the Fab@Home guys produced a while back. also the Fab@ guys fudged a step with a paper divider whereas these guys are apparently planning to go for industrial production soon.

I am interested in the possibility of an inkjet type head that prints electronic components. Most of this stuff is under patent right now but people are printing capacitors, diodes, transistors and resistors in industrial quantities today. Printing out simple devices like counters and logic gates is possible. While such electronics might be big and slow they would be perfect for micromanufacturing and would cut down on the RepRap vitamin count. Does anybody have access to these guys? (Apparently they do a lot of rfid work)

Hi Brian,

... around 2001 i developed a mikro-dispenser which is capable of placing single droplets of high viscous fluids or pastes in sizes down to submicron-range - apended an image with an array of 30 micron big droplets in a grid of 100 microns displacement.

The droplet down right is bigger beacause here i placed 3 droplets one on the other.

It's patented too, but nobody really wanted this technology then - it was much to fine for the current needs in 2002

In combination with conventional dispensers for fluids and pastes, extruder for the housing and solids and maybe some other tools (dremel, gripper, vacuum/pick'n'place, ...) for the assembly you should be able to build any structure with an accuracy down to microns (or even finer )

Viktor