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Microporous bayberry-like nano-silica fillers enabling superior performance gel polymer electrolyte for lithium metal batteries

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Abstract

Unlike conventional organic liquid electrolytes, which have uncontrollable lithium dendrite growth and serious safety concerns, gel polymer electrolytes (GPEs) are widely considered to be one of the best candidates for the next generation of high energy density lithium metal batteries (LMBs). However, the challenge of maintaining high mechanical strength and good electrochemical stability simultaneously has not yet been met by these materials. Therefore, in this paper, we designed bayberry silica nanoparticles (BSNPs) with ultra-high specific surface area and compounded them with polyvinylidene fluoride – hexafluoropropylene (PVDF-HFP) (BSNPs-CPE) to effectively solve these problems. The results show that compared with the blank sample and industrial silica nanoparticles (SNPs-CPE) composite electrolyte, BSNPs-CPE not only has higher absorption rate and ion conductivity but also has a higher lithium-ion migration. In addition, due to the good compatibility between BSNPs-CPE and lithium metal, a stable SEI layer can be generated. At the same time, lithium metal batteries of BSNPs-CPE exhibit good cycling performance and rate capacity. After 300 cycles, the excellent capacity of up to 147.2 mAh g− 1 remains at the current rate of 1.0 C. More encouragingly, the capacity of 119 mAh g− 1 was obtained at the current rate of 10 C, which keeps much higher than that of the blank sample (76.2 mAh g− 1). This kind of nanostructure with micropore and high specific surface area provides important significance for the design of high-performance lithium metal battery.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by funding from “135” Projects Fund of CAS QIBEBT Director Innovation Foundation, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA09010105), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2014BQ004 and No. ZR2018BEM037), Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M642718), Qingdao postdoctoral applied research project and The CAS Hundred Talents Program (Y5100719AL).

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  1. Jian Guo and Hongbin Hou contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Polymer Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266042, People’s Republic of China

    Jian Guo, Junmei Cheng & Hongguang Sun

  2. Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, 266101, People’s Republic of China

    Hongbin Hou, Chengdong Wang, Qinggang Wang & Xiao Chen

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  1. Jian Guo
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Correspondence to Qinggang Wang, Hongguang Sun or Xiao Chen.

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Guo, J., Hou, H., Cheng, J. et al. Microporous bayberry-like nano-silica fillers enabling superior performance gel polymer electrolyte for lithium metal batteries. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 32, 81–93 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-020-04645-4

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