Paper and Cloth Batteries

If a team of researchers at Stanford University are to be believed, Batteries made from plain copier paper could make for future energy storage that is truly paper thin.
These guys started with off-the-shelf copier paper, painting it with an "ink" made of carbon nanotubes-tiny cylinders of carbon - to collect electric charge..
The coated paper is then dipped in lithium-containing solutions and an electrolyte to provide the chemical reaction that generates a battery's electric current.
The paper acts to collect the electric charge from the reaction. Using paper in this way could reduce the weight of batteries, typically made with metal current collectors, by 20%.
The team's batteries are also capable of releasing their stored energy quickly. That is a valuable characteristic for applications that need quick bursts of energy, such as electric vehicles - although the team has no immediate plans to develop vehicle batteries.
The team says that adaptations to the technique in the future could allow for simply painting the nanotube ink and active materials onto surfaces such as walls.
They have even experimented with a number of textiles, paving the way for batteries made largely of cloth.
Their work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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