SOLID ELECTROLYTES: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES

FRECHERO M. A.

Congreso; RELITE 2024; 2024

Currently, the electrochemical accumulation of energy is a reality. Electromobility, home support and countless portable devices added to large-scale supply centers for small cities and industries are remarkably working. This new technology imposes many challenges related to the different working conditions, manufacturing costs, and the principles of the circular economy, ensuring a low environmental impact by applying the green chemistry. It is needed to develop devices for all humanity that are increasingly demanding and dependent on energy. Nowadays, solid-state batteries offer the potential for enhanced safety and energy density. Despite significant ad-vances, principally in solid-state electrolytes, scientists still have fundamental chal-lenges regarding the composition, synthesis methods, and resulting thermal and me-chanical properties of materials. The core issues are focused on three key points: find-ing efficient ionic conductors, improving electrolyte-electrode junctions, and encom-passing electrode and electrolyte green design to minimize the environmental impact. The desired electrochemical performance for solid state electrolytes imposes to achieve an ionic conductivity higher than 10−4 S/cm at a room temperature, with a low activation energy for the lithium-ion diffusion, ensuring an adequate chemical and mechanical durability to prevent the lithium dendrites formation, and synthesis methods starting from cost-effective raw materials, and applying green preparation procedures. Oxide-based solid electrolytes have gained increasing interest because they reach the distinctive characteristics mentioned above and allow the operation with high-voltage cathodes. When their weaknesses are considered their relatively lower ionic conduc-tivity compared to those of sulfides and poor wetting at the interfaces limiting the deformability must be mentioned. A potential solution to such technical issues is the formation of glass-nanoceramic composites. Such materials allow to minimize the interface resistance and to increase the cell polarization over extended cycling periods. Additionally, they make possible to diminish their sintering temperatures, lowering the fabrication cost.This presentation highlights and examines some of the most encouraging findings from our research work on materials based on crystalline and glassy complex oxides. Structures like Garnet type, LISICON and NASICON type have been studied as pure micro and nanocrystalline, doped and combined with ionic liquids and glassy matrices (Frechero et al.). Alongside a discussion about the analysis of those key challenges on materials synthesis and characterization which are waiting for solutions in the field of solid electrolytes to develop solid state batteries for energy storage systems at differ-ent size scale.Frechero et al. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marisa-Frechero