With the continuing integration of electronics and humans, microelectronics need to become smaller, lighter, and now flexible for wearability. This thesis reports on the feasibility of using nanoheaters, exothermic alloy structures, for joining flexible polymer parts for batteries. While flexible displays have come into production there are few reliable flexible power sources for flexible electronics. The main difficulty with flexible batteries is that it is difficult to find a flexible packaging material that can either keep the electrolytic solution inside the battery or keep water and other possible contaminates out of the battery. Rigid metals such as aluminum have been the norm for this task as they are impervious to nearly anything and use some plastic parts as seals. Liquid Crystal Polymers have potential to be used in flexible packaging since they are resistant to electrolytic solutions and are impervious to water and contaminates. The concern with using LCP to package flexible batteries is sealing the LCP. With smaller cells and more complex configurations of integrated electronics and batteries the need for a smaller and more localized joining method such as a localized heat source is needed. Nanoheaters have been identified to provide a very short and local heat source that limits the heat affected zone considerably when compared to other joining methods. In this thesis, methods for using nanoheaters to join and seal flexible batteries are explored using numerical models with COMSOL and experiments with commercial and laboratory grade nanoheaters.
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