3. Conclusions
We fabricated a 100 μm thin-film cathode for TBs by using an acrylic acid derivative terpolymer (LA136D) binder and studied the performance in both single-cells and stacks. It is found the ψ of LA136D is relatively low (39.2wt %). And due to the high adhesion strength, LA136D can fabricate thin-film, non-circular, and mechanical robust electrodes at a content of 1wt %, which contributes to only 0.05 MPa gas pressure increase in real hermetically sealed thermal battery stacks. The single-cell and stacks electrochemical performance tests are shown LA136D is well compatible with the cathode and molten salt materials, and the LA136D thin-film cathode exhibits superior electrochemical performance to the traditional pressed-pellet cathode. Especially, in a 130s pulse discharging test, the TBs it is indicated that LA136D thin-film cathode leads to a remarkable 440% reduction in polarization and 300% enhancement in the utilization efficiency of cathode materials, while with only ~0.05 MPa gas pressure increment compare with the traditional pressed-pellet cathode. Our work proves the feasibility of LA136D in fabricating safe thin-film cathodes for high-efficiency and high-power TBs and contributes to arousing the attention to gas production of binders in real thermal battery stacks.