Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Diacrylate-Supported Ionogels with Consistent Capacitive Behavior and Tunable Elastic Response

Abstract

Harnessing the many favorable properties of ionic liquids in a solid electrolyte thin film form is desirable for a host of electrical energy storage applications, including electrochemical double layer capacitors. Using a cross-linked polymer matrix to provide structural support, freestanding ionogel materials can be achieved with a wide range of polymer weight fractions. Compression testing and impedance spectroscopy have been used to characterize the mechanical and electrical responses of ionogels containing between 4.9 and 44.7 wt % poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate. Although the elastic modulus of these solid electrolyte materials is observed to vary by more than 4 orders of magnitude within the composition range studied, concomitant changes in gel ionic conductivity and double layer capacitance were much less dramatic.

High strain stretchable solid electrolytes

“…The tensile breaking strains were more than 10× larger than those reported in the literature for a free radical polymerised ionogel [16,23]. Of note, the failure strain for both a 1 and 0.5 mol % crosslinked ionogels was larger than the maximum failure strain (380%) reported by Fujii et.…”

“…High compliance and flexible electrolytes have been prepared by forming polymer networks within a range of ionic liquids, and the resulting solids are referred to as ionogels [14][15][16][17][18].…”

Rapid, microwave-assisted thermal polymerization of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate-supported ionogels

“…41,42 UV-initiated polymerizations can also be employed to create ionogels in several minutes according to some reports; [30][31][32] however, this is still not as rapid as is demonstrated here for microwave processing (Fig. 1), which can be as fast as 10-25 s.…”

Deformable and Transparent Ionic and Electronic Conductors for Soft Energy Devices

“…Strategies such as unzipping of crystallites and rupturing of surficial bonds have been used as energy dissipation mechanisms to increase the fracture energy of dielectric elastomers; this can be adopted in the case of ionogel to further improve the fracture energy. [219][220][221][222] Transmittance is also an important issue for STECs and STICs. Due to a trade-off between transparency and conductivity in STECs, it is quite challenging to obtain STECs with high transparency and high conductivity.…”