A Liquid Electrolyte with De-Solvated Lithium Ions for Lithium-Metal Battery

By Z. Chang, Y. Qiao, Han Deng, Huijun Yang, P. He, Haoshen Zhou. 2020

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Traditional liquid electrolytes used in rechargeable batteries, fuel cells, and electrochemical capacitors composed of solvents, anions, and solvents solvated cations (e.g., lithium ions, Li+), follow classic “cations with solvation” electrolyte configuration and can be defined as “cations solvated electrolytes.” In these electrolytes, the de-solvation processes of solvated cations only occur when the cations inserted-deposited on the electrodes’ surface. Here, different from traditional electrolytes, a new liquid electrolyte with de-solvated Li+ was discovered (“Li+ de-solvated electrolyte”), since it merely composed of inactive “frozen-like” solvent and crystal-like salt solute. Inspiringly, its electrochemical stability was remarkably improved (extended to 4.5 V for “Li+ de-solvated ether-based electrolyte”). Ultra-stable high-energy-density lithium-metal batteries (LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2//Li) were achieved (half-cell: 140 mAh g−1 after 830 cycles; full-cell: 170 mAh g−1 after 200 cycles under twice excessed Li). It is also surprising that this does not present any cathode-electrolyte interface (CEI) layer on the cycled NCM-811 surface benefit from the “Li+ de-solvated electrolyte.”

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cd030fefd120799937176105fe1eed7b3b40bc0