3D printing in lithium battery manufacturing: opportunities, challenges, and perspectives

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is emerging as a transformative manufacturing route for lithium batteries, enabling structural and compositional control far beyond the limits of conventional coating and stacking methods. This review critically surveys advances in 3D printing techniques used for lithium batteries, including direct ink writing, laser powder bed fusion, photopolymerization-based printing, and fused-deposition modeling. These approaches have been applied to fabricate electrodes, solid electrolytes (SEs), current collectors, and thermal-management components. 3D-printed architectures, such as gyroid copper collectors and graphene aerogel electrodes, exemplify how tailored geometry and porosity enhance ion/electron transport, mechanical robustness, and dendrite-free cycling. Despite these advances, challenges remain in printable materials chemistry, sub-100 µm structural fidelity, and interfacial integrity across dissimilar layers. Balancing high ceramic loading (>70 wt%) with rheological stability, while maintaining low interfacial resistance, is a key scientific and engineering bottleneck. To address these complex trade-offs, data-driven and AI-assisted strategies, such as Gaussian-process optimization for ink formulation and generative modeling for microstructure design, are emerging to accelerate this convergence of materials discovery and process optimization. Looking forward, progress will rely on co-developing multifunctional printable materials (ionogels, sulfur copolymers, hybrid electrolytes), hybrid 3D-printing workflows coupling sintering, coating, and curing, and standardized evaluation metrics linking laboratory demonstrations to scalable production. Building on these foundations, 3D printing is poised to evolve from a prototyping technique into a disruptive manufacturing paradigm for next-generation lithium batteries powering flexible electronics, electric vehicles, and grid-scale energy storage.