Functional Electrolytes by Reduced Ionic Interactions

The lack of safe yet high-performance electrolytes is one of the main challenges for battery development and their implementation on a larger scale. The electrolytes of our modern, omnipresent, batteries contain flammable solvents and fluorinated salts that are toxic. This poses serious safety and environmental problems, even at the recycling stage as well.

To develop next-generation batteries, novel electrolytes are indispensable; these electrolytes should conduct ions efficiently and also directly influence the safety, service life and overall performance of the battery.

This project will develop novel fluorine-free liquid alkali metal salts that can be used as solvent-free electrolytes with unique properties; they are non-flammable, liquid at low temperature, thermally and electrochemically stable and relatively low-cost.

The synthesis and characterization including multinuclear NMR, FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, thermal stability, ionic conductivity and ion diffusivity will be carried out by a PhD student supervised by Assoc. Prof. Faiz Ullah Shah, LTU, Luleå and co-supervised by Prof. Patrik Johansson, Chalmers, Gothenburg.

The electrochemical studies and battery testing will be performed jointly at LTU and Chalmers.

A new concept is applied to electrolytes research to get high ionic conductivity through reduced ionic interactions by incorporating sterically hindered functional groups and electron deficient self-tunable anion receptors into the electrolyte formulation.