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/npsi/ctrl?action=rtdoc&an=9064981&lang=en http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/npsi/ctrl?action=rtdoc&an=9064981&lang=frAccess and use of this website and the material on it are subject to the Terms and Conditions set forth at http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/npsi/jsp/nparc_cp.jsp?lang=en NRC Publications Archive Archives des publications du CNRCThis publication could be one of several versions: author's original, accepted manuscript or the publisher's version. / La version de cette publication peut être l'une des suivantes : la version prépublication de l'auteur, la version acceptée du manuscrit ou la version de l'éditeur. For the publisher's version, please access the DOI link below./ Pour consulter la version de l'éditeur, utilisez le lien DOI ci-dessous.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour. 2007.06.103 Journal of Power Sources, 174, 2, pp. 883-888, 2007 Investigation of Li salt doped succinonitrile as potential solid electrolytes for lithium batteries Abouimrane, A.; Whitfield, Pamela; Niketic, Svetlana; Davidson, Isobel AbstractSolid ionic conductors with good conductivity at room temperature and mechanical flexibility are very attractive candidates for application as electrolytes for secondary lithium batteries. Plastic crystal electrolytes formed by doping succinonitrile with lithium salts can potentially meet these requirements. In this study, succinonitrile doped with various lithium salts were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry, powder X-ray diffraction, conductivity measurements and in electrochemical studies. The much better conductivities and electrochemical performance of certain lithium salts in comparison to the others studied has been found to be correlated to their propensity to form crystalline adducts with succinonitrile at low molar concentrations. Of the lithium salts studied, only two which did not form crystalline adducts at low concentrations: lithium bistrifluoromethanesulphonylimide (Li[CF 3 SO 2 ] 2 N) and lithium tetrafluorborate (LiBF 4 ) had high enough conductivities at ambient temperature for evaluation in lithium cells. Contrary to prior predictions, both showed reasonable capacities, high coulombic efficiencies, and good capacity retention even with metallic lithium as the anode. Crown

Increasing the energy density of Li-ion batteries is very crucial for the success of electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage, and nextgeneration consumer electronics. One popular approach is to incrementally increase the capacity of the graphite anode by integrating silicon into composites with capacities between 500 and 1000 mAh/g as a transient and practical alternative to the more-challenging, silicon-only anodes. In this work, we have calculated the percentage of improvement in the capacity of silicon:graphite composites and their impact on energy density of Li-ion full cell. We have used the Design of Experiment method to optimize composites using data from half cells, and it is found that 16% improvements in practical energy density of Li-ion full cells can be achieved using 15 to 25 wt% of silicon. However, full-cell assembly and testing of these composites using LiNi 0.5 Mn 0.5 Co 0.5 O 2 cathode have proven to be challenging and composites with no more than 10 wt% silicon were tested giving 63% capacity retention of 95 mAh/g at only 50 cycles. The work demonstrates that introducing even the smallest amount of silicon into graphite anodes is still a challenge and to overcome that improvements to the different components of the Li-ion battery are required.

The conventional polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) binder works well with the graphite anode, but when combined with silicon in composites to increase the energy density of Li-ion batteries, it results in severe capacity fade. Herein, by using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analyses, we reveal that this failure stems from the loss of connectivity between the silicon (or its agglomerates), graphite, and PVDF binder because of the mechanical stresses experienced during battery cycling. More importantly, we reveal for the first time that the PVDF binder undergoes chemical decomposition during the cycling of not only the composite but also the Si-only or even graphite-only electrodes despite the excellent battery performance of the latter. Through X-ray photoemission electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy techniques, LiF was identified as the predominant decomposition product. We show that the distribution of LiF in the electrodes due to the differences in the interactions between PVDF and either Si or graphite could correlate with the performance of the battery. This study shows that the most suitable binder for the composite electrode is a polymer with a good chemical interaction with both graphite and silicon.

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