Title: The combination of Thin Energy and Flexible IoT – Adapting Printed Batteries for Long Range communications
Abstract:
Zinergy powered smart label
The advent of printed large area electronics has started delivering exciting innovations over the last few years. A key enabler for fully thin devices is printed energy! Over the last 3 years, Zinergy has embarked on a mission to develop simple, low cost, printed energy storage devices which are compatible with other printed electronic devices.
Printing is a very versatile technique for batteries. It allows to control not only size and shape of devices, but also via thickness control and ink formulations there is a toolkit to adapt the battery´s power requirements to a large set of applications, from high energy, low current applications to high power. Printing batteries allows a degree of freedom in design not possible with traditional batteries.
In this paper we discuss one such optimisation, the adaptation of printed batteries for IoT applications with long range communication ability. We talk about the adaptations required to allow long range communication and high pulse currents, and show possibilities and results.
This capability has allowed the production of smart labels which can amongst other things track locations of goods or measure other parameters and communicate of ranges of a few km. Results of field trials will be shown as well as a projection of possibilities we expect in the coming years.