In 2013, a Harvard team reported a lithium-ion microbattery made by 3D printing interlocking electrodes. The finished cell was described as smaller than a grain of sand. The “first” claim was specific: the report called it the first lithium-ion battery manufactured by 3D printing—not the first miniature battery. It was a laboratory demonstration made with a custom-built printer and specialized inks, not a design shown to work on an ordinary consumer 3D printer.
How was the miniature battery 3D printed?
Researchers in Jennifer Lewis’s group at Harvard used a custom-built 3D printer to deposit conductive inks in a stacked, interdigitated pattern. The interlocking geometry placed the two electrode materials close together while using much of the cell’s available volume.
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Two electrode inks formed the cell
- The anode ink contained lithium titanate nanoparticles.
- The cathode ink contained lithium iron phosphate nanoparticles.
As reported by Chemistry World on 24 June 2013, the electrodes were 60 μm wide, with 50 μm between them. After printing, the electrodes were dried and heated to harden the ink, then packaged in a plastic casing with electrolyte. The process combined precision deposition, electrode materials and cell packaging; it was not simply a matter of printing a battery from ordinary filament.
Why print interdigitated electrodes?
The design aimed to fill as much of the battery’s volume as possible with active electrode material. Lewis explained the rationale to Chemistry World: “The battery’s energy capacity depends on how much of its volume is actually filled with the active electrodes, so we used this stacked, interdigitated architecture to fill as much space as possible.”
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What did the 2013 report claim—and what does “first” mean?
Chemistry World described the finished battery as smaller than a single grain of sand and called it the first lithium-ion battery manufactured by 3D printing. The claim concerns how this particular kind of battery was made. It does not mean miniature batteries had never existed: the same report noted that miniature commercial batteries were already available. Nor was it a claim to have invented 3D-printed electronics generally.
The underlying paper, Sun and colleagues’ “3D Printing of Interdigitated Li‐Ion Microbattery Architectures,” appeared in Advanced Materials in 2013. The publication describes the research architecture; the accessible account of the fabrication details and performance comparisons comes from Chemistry World’s report.
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What performance did the team report?
Chemistry World reported a power density of 2.7 mW cm⁻² and characterized the battery’s cycle life, charge rate and energy density as comparable to commercial batteries. Those are historical research figures and a comparison made in 2013, not current product specifications or a claim that the prototype matched every commercial battery in every use.
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Simon Leigh, a materials chemist at the University of Warwick, told Chemistry World: “3D printing is giving cutting-edge materials research a route to making actual devices and products.” Lewis described the wider ambition this way: “Most of the 3D tools that have been developed today are for rapid prototyping, and that’s really just to show shapes. We want to go beyond form and add function.” These quotations appeared in the 2013 news report.
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How does the 2024 microscale battery differ?
A separate study published by Zhang and colleagues in Nature Chemical Engineering in 2024 reported a microscale soft rechargeable lithium-ion droplet battery. It is a later, different design—not a continuation or validation of the 2013 “first” claim.
| Feature | 2013 printed microbattery | 2024 droplet battery |
|---|---|---|
| Fabrication architecture | Custom printer deposited stacked, interdigitated electrode inks. | Nanolitre lipid-supported silk-hydrogel droplets were assembled into a battery. |
| Materials and activation | Lithium titanate anode and lithium iron phosphate cathode inks; dried, heated and packaged with electrolyte. | Lithium manganese oxide cathode, lithium titanate anode and a lithium chloride separator droplet; UV light crosslinked the hydrogel and activated the device. |
| Scale and reported results | Described as smaller than a grain of sand; 60 μm electrode width and 50 μm spacing. Chemistry World reported 2.7 mW cm⁻² power density. | The paper reports printable droplets as small as 0.5 nL, about 100 μm in diameter; a unit made from 10 nL droplets was about 600 μm long. It reports a 0.65 V average discharge plateau. For 1 μL droplets, reported volumetric capacities were 17, 27 and 46 nAh μL⁻¹ at currents of 1, 0.5 and 0.2 μA, respectively. Output-capacity retention exceeded 72% after 50 cycles at 1 μA. |
| Demonstrated application | Laboratory microbattery demonstration. | In ex vivo mouse-heart experiments, the authors demonstrated defibrillation and pacing-related effects; this is not evidence of clinical use. |
The two studies show different approaches to making small research batteries. They were not tested head to head, and the 2024 biomedical experiments do not establish a consumer or clinical application.
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Can you reproduce it with a home 3D printer?
The 2013 work does not establish that a generic consumer printer, standard filament or off-the-shelf conductive ink can reproduce the device. The reported system used a custom-built printer, specialized electrode inks, controlled post-print drying and heating, and packaging with electrolyte. The 2024 droplet battery likewise depended on a distinct hydrogel-based assembly and UV activation process. Neither study presents a ready-to-follow consumer battery project or a retail product recommendation.
Why the result mattered
The technical point was not only that a battery could be made very small, but that 3D printing could place functional electrode materials in a carefully interlocked geometry. That approach offered a way to build a research-scale device whose internal structure—not just its outside shape—was defined during fabrication. The result remains a 2013 laboratory milestone, while later work such as the 2024 droplet battery explores separate routes to microscale energy storage.
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