Electrolytes with boron additives can overcome challenges like lithium dendrite formation, short cycle life, and low coulombic efficiency in batteries.
Scientists from China have confirmed that electrolytes with boron additives can tackle the major challenges of lithium metal batteries.Energy storage devices that use lithium metal as an anode have exhibited an energy density of over 500 Wh/kg.
However, a research team from China’s Nankai University claimed that the practical application of lithium metal batteries is still severely limited by issues such as lithium dendrite formation, short cycle life, and low Coulombic efficiency of Li plating/stripping.The team highlighted that the optimization of electrolyte formulations is known as an effective approach to conquering those challenges, and additive engineering is known as one of the most cost-effective methods for commercial applications.Boron additives offer multiple benefitsResearchers pointed out that boron additives offer multiple benefits for lithium metal batteries. They claimed that the strong electron deficiency can assist the dissolution of Li2O, which can reduce the interfacial charge transfer resistance of the Li metal anode.Through dissolving LiF deposits within CFx pores, boron additives can be further applied to Li/CFx batteries to increase the lithium-ion diffusion coefficient, thus largely improving the specific discharge capacity and increasing the high-rate performance, according to researchers.Long cycling stabilityThey also revealed that the oxidative decomposition of boron additives at the cathode interface facilitates the formation of the robust cathode electrolyte interphase, which contributes to long cycling stability of high-voltage cathodes.The team explored four boron additives as candidates with various functional group. They revealed that electrostatic potential is used to find the best anion acceptors, in which tris borate is endowed with a maximum ESP of all B-ads. The sites with a more positive value of ESP are known to easily occur in nucleophilic reactions and thus can strongly attract the small anions, acting as the most promising additives of electrolytes, according to a press release.Boron additives effectively mitigate critical challengesPublished in the journal Science China Chemistry, the study reveals that there are still limited systematic investigations into how the electron-deficient properties of B-ads regulate the solvation structures of electrolytes and further impact the electrode-electrolyte interface.“In this work, we designed four B-ads for lithium metal batteries and revealed that both the structure of the boron compound and the size of the anion play crucial roles in determining the physicochemical properties of electrolytes,” said researchers in the study.The research team also revealed that through spectra characterization as well as molecular dynamics simulations, the addition of THFPB was also confirmed to enhance ion aggregations in the solvation structure, thereby contributing to the formation of robust electrolyte-electrode interphase, especially for the high-voltage cathode.“Consequently, the Li∥LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 batteries using thin Li anode, high-loading cathode, and 0.1 M THFPB added electrolytes maintained 80% of its capacity after 150 cycles. This work demonstrates the versatileness of B-ads that effectively mitigate critical challenges of energy-dense battery systems,” said researchers in the study.
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