(195g) Glass-Ceramic As a Solid Electrolyte for Lithium-Ion Batteries

Despite commanding a huge market share of secondary batteries, current lithium ion batteries have safety concerns due to their use of flammable organic solvents as electrolytes. Successfully replacing the liquid electrolyte in a lithium ion battery with a solid electrolyte with comparable capacity would result in batteries that are safer to use, have a longer cycle life, possess minimal self-discharge, wider operating potential and temperature window.

Solid electrolytes currently have a limitation in that they do not match the ability of the organic liquids in conducting lithium ions because they exist as crystals and thus possess crystalline boundaries which offer higher ionic resistances.

Appropriate combination of a glass with a ceramic that contains a lithium-ion conductive phase is shown to result in an amorphous composite having denser micro structure, better chemical stability and no grain boundary effects. This is a pioneering breakthrough and a major upgrade to the ordinary crystalline ceramic, which, previously, had been shown to have the highest bulk crystal ionic conductivity among solid electrolytes but greatly limited in application because of the much higher ionic resistance of its crystal boundaries.