Wearable electronics are playing an important role in the health care industry. Wearable sensors are either directly attached to the body surface or embedded into worn garments. Textile-based batteries can help towards development of body conformal wearable sensors. In this letter, we demonstrate a 2D planar textile-based primary Ag₂O–Zn battery fabricated using the stencil printing method. A synthetic polyester woven fabric is used as the textile substrate and polyethylene oxide material is used as the separator. The demonstrated battery achieves an areal capacity of 0.6 mAh/cm² with an active electrode area of 0.5 cm × 1 cm.

Flexible power sources such as batteries are essential to realize wearable and conformable electronic devices. The mechanical stability of the electrodes plays an important role in determining the overall flexibility of the battery. Styrene block copolymers-based elastomers have the potential to be used as binder materials in the electrodes for retaining their structural integrity under flexing during regular use. In this work, we demonstrate a stencil-printed flexible primary Ag₂O-Zn battery on a nonconductive nylon mesh substrate that uses styrene-butadiene rubber as the anodic binder. A polyacrylic acid-based alkaline polymer gel is used as an electrolyte. The flexible alkaline battery achieved discharge capacities of $2.5 \mathrm{mAh}$ and $1.6 \mathrm{mAh}$ without and with a bend radius of 0.8 $\mathrm{cm}$, respectively, under a constant current load condition of $0.1 \mathrm{mA}$.

Printed textile-based flexible batteries are gaining attention in several applications, but they are becoming more relevant to the health care industry in terms of realizing wearable and skin-conformable electronic devices. A flexible battery must ideally be deformable along multiple directions. In this work, with an aim to develop a fully printed omnidirectional deformable battery, we report the fabrication process of a novel single-polymer-based flexible non-rechargeable planar Ag₂O-Zn battery on a textile substrate using the stencil printing method. Except for the electrolyte, all the components of the battery, including the current collectors, the anode, the cathode, and the separator membrane, are fabricated using a single polymer, namely styrene–ethylene–butylene–styrene (SEBS). To fabricate the SEBS separator, we introduce the solvent evaporation-induced phase separation (SEIPS) process. In the SEIPS method, toluene and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) are selected as the solvent–nonsolvent pair. The SEBS: toluene: DMSO system with a wt% ratio of 6:85:9 showed improved performance regarding the OCV tests. A polyacrylic acid (PAA)-based alkaline polymer gel is used as an electrolyte. The demonstrated process is simple, and, with suitable modifications, it should find its use in the development of digitally printed alkaline batteries.