Samuel LORENZ1, Thomas SCHUBERT1
1IoLiTec Ionic Liquids Technologies GmbH, Heilbronn, Germany
The development of cheap, safe and sustainable batteries with high performance is currently getting more and more important and is increasingly in the focus of national and EU-wide research and development efforts.
As classical Li-Ion batteries have several drawbacks, namely the safety risk due to a flammable organic electrolyte and the capped energy densities, alternative battery systems are of great interest.
There is a tremendous amount of new battery systems that are currently under development that all have their own advantages and drawbacks. In most of them ionic liquids can or even must play a crucial role.
A majority of new battery systems is looking into the use of metal anodes as one way to increase energy density. In this case ionic liquids can be used to improve the SEI and increase the cycle stability of the battery.
As cathode materials there is a big interest in the use of either sulfur as cheap and sustainable material or the use of GDEs. In both cases ionic liquids have beneficial effects, namely a suppression of the formation of polysulfides for sulfur cathodes and the significant facilitation of the GDE use due to the low vapour pressure of the ionic liquids, meaning the electrolyte won’t dry out.
In our contribution, we’ll show how ionic liquids-based electrolytes are improving or enabling different new post-lithium battery systems with a main focus on Li-S and metal-oxygen battery systems that have been developed under different governmental funded projects (FiMaLiS, AMaLiS, LuZi).