Transient Rechargeable Batteries Triggered by Cascade Reactions.

Transient battery is a new type of technology that allows the battery to disappear by an external trigger at any time. In this work, we successfully demonstrated the first transient rechargeable batteries based on dissoluble electrodes including V2O5 as the cathode and lithium metal as the anode as well as a biodegradable separator and battery encasement (PVP and sodium alginate, respectively). All the components are robust in a traditional lithium-ion battery (LIB) organic electrolyte and disappear in water completely within minutes due to triggered cascade reactions. With a simple cut-and-stack method, we designed a fully transient device with an area of 0.5 cm by 1 cm and total energy of 0.1 J. A shadow-mask technique was used to demonstrate the miniature device, which is compatible with transient electronics manufacturing. The materials, fabrication methods, and integration strategy discussed will be of interest for future developments in transient, self-powered electronics. The demonstration of a miniature Li battery shows the feasibility toward system integration for all transient electronics.