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Engineers Build Bendy Batteries for Wearables 可穿戴设备和可拉伸电池更配哦

The flat lithium ion batteries that power smartwatches are built by stacking the battery components¹: positive and negative electrodes, current collectors and a separator. It's akin² to piling up sheets of paper—you get a stack that you can bend or roll—but you can't stretch it.

用于智能手表的锂离子电池是通过叠加电池组件制造的:正负电极、电流收集器和分离器。这就类似于把纸张堆叠起来，得到一个可以弯曲或滚动、但是不能拉伸的纸堆。

\But now researchers have designed what could be a much friendlier battery for wearables. One that's bendy and stretchy, instead of a little brick. They built the bendy battery by starting with a coiled wire, sort of like a slinky—then layered the traditional battery components—electrodes, and all that—on the coil, to build a silver–zinc based battery. And the result?

不过现在，研究人员设计出了一种更适用于可穿戴设备的电池。这种电池不再是一小块，它易弯曲且有弹性可拉伸。他们从一根有点像玩具弹簧的线圈入手开始制作，然后将传统的电池组件——电极等物品分层堆积到线圈上，建造出一个银锌电池。结果呢?

"Once the battery is flexed⁴ it experiences very minimum stresses. You can imagine flexing⁵ the slinky, you can easily flex³ it." Alla Zamarayeva, a materials scientist at U.C. Berkeley. "That's why we were able to flex this battery for 17,000 times while there was cycle in it, in situ, without decreasing electrochemical performance."

“这种电池只要经受非常小的压力就会发生弯曲。想象一下如何弄弯玩具弹簧。你可以很轻易地就把它掰弯。”加州大学伯克利分校的材料科学家安拉说道。“这就是为什么我们在它内部有线圈的情况下，能够将它弯折一万七千多次，而且还不减少它的电化学性能。”

She and her team built even stretchier batteries using serpentine⁶ designs—imagine squiggly lines of battery, embedded⁷ in a transparent⁸ polymer that looks like a band-aid. When you pull the ends of the Band-Aid, the squiggle elongates—offering stretchiness at larger scales. The study is in the journal Science Advances.

她和她的团队使用蛇形设计来制造更有弹性的电池——想象一下电池弯弯曲曲的样子，嵌在一个透明的聚合物里，看起来像一个创可贴。当你拉扯创可贴的末端时，拉伸的范围会变得更大。这项研究发表在《科学进展》杂志上。

Zamarayeva's co-author Aminy Ostfeld helped integrate the bendy battery into an energy-storage bracelet⁹. And it has a feature you won't yet find on the Apple Watch: solar cells. "Especially as more and more of these kinds of devices are being developed and we have more and more of them per person, it's going to start getting pretty impractical¹⁰ for us to plug in every single one of them." If their ideas are commercialized, they could give wearables designers a lot more flexibility¹¹ to innovate¹².

安拉的合著者艾米尼·奥斯特菲尔德帮忙将有弹性的电池集成到一个能量存储手镯中。而且它还有一个你在苹果手表上找不到的功能:太阳能电池。“特别是随着此类设备越来越多的被开发出来，而我们每个人也拥有越来越多的这类设备，因而同时带上所有这些设备开始变得不太实际。”如果她们的想法被商业化，她们将给可穿戴设备设计师的创新带来更多的灵活性。