Multifunctional Composite Paper Adaptable to Industrial Papermaking

Paper lacks functions such as heat, electrical or ion conductance required for various engineering applications. For this reason, various approaches have been used to add such functions in the form of inks, nanoparticles, or biopolymers onto a prefabricated paper. These processes include screen or digital printing, and roll-to-roll press, resulting in two main categories of multifunctional paper: Printed electronics and paper microfluids analytical systems. In either of these, pulp fibers are in dry state and full-exploitation of the fiber adsorption is not possible, furthermore, it requires an added step/cost in the paper industry and devices that are coated/fabricated onto the paper, and makes the recycling process more complex.<br/>We hereby advance papermaking by an industrially scalable chemical modification of pulp that can subsequently adsorb numerous functional materials ranging from conducting polymers to nanoparticles to turn the wet pulp into functional pulp. The functionalized pulps can then be used alone or in mixtures in industrial paper-making to form a fundamentally new form of functional paper at scale. As an example, we show a paper battery that is stable more than 1400 charge-discharge cycles.