Pablo VALLET MORENO1, Juan José PARAJO1, Óscar CABEZA2, María VILLANUEVA1, Luís Miguel VARELA1, Josefa SALGADO1
1Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
2Universidade de Coruña, Coruña, Spain
Society’s dependence on fossil fuels has become an inherent problem for environment and commercial development, especially with the latest geopolitical instabilities. This technical issue has revealed the necessity of energic independence to mitigate the climate change and market fluctuations. To solve this question, renewable energies are seen as an alternative to traditional fuel sources, but renewable energies present systematic issues that need to be solved before their general implantation, such as productions peaks that usually do not correspond with demand in the electrical network. By this framework, energy storage has a crucial role to accumulate the produced renewable energy to be used when necessary.
The fourth-generation batteries, also known as solid (or quasi-solid) state batteries, has received an increasing attention, and their research field have been enlarged in the last decades. To attack this problem, the establishment of ionogel as quasi-solid electrolytes is a hot topic for many researchers throughout the scientific world. The ionogel is defined as an electrolytic solution nanoconfined in an isolating scaffold, which keeps the liquid properties but with the main advantages of the solid-state electrolytes.
Ionogels can be obtained by sol-gel procedure and present many advantages such as an ionic conductivity closer to the liquid state and the benefit to tune and modify the synthesis easily to obtain the suitable ionogel for an specific application.
In this work, different ionic liquids (IL) and their mixtures with lithium salt as electrolytic solution are nanoconfined in a silica scaffold by sol-gel method and are characterized thermoelectrical, structural and mechanically with the aim to be used as energy storage electrolytes showing their interesting potential for this application.
Authors acknowledge M. Gómez (RIAIDT-USC) for the technical supporting DSC measurements. This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER Program through theprojects MAT2017-89239-C2-1-Pand MAT2017-89239-C2-2-P and the SISE NetworkRED2018-102679-Tas well as by Xunta de Galicia through GRC ED431C 2016/001 project and the Galician Network of Ionic Liquids (ReGaLIs) ED431D 2017/06.P. Vallet and J. J. Parajó thank funding support of FPI Program from Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities and I2C postdoctoral Program of Xunta de Galicia, respectively.