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Advances and issues in developing salt-concentrated battery electrolytes

A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 26 March 2019

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Abstract

With a worldwide trend towards the efficient use of renewable energies and the rapid expansion of the electric vehicle market, the importance of rechargeable battery technologies, particularly lithium-ion batteries, has steadily increased. In the past few years, a major breakthrough in electrolyte materials was achieved by simply increasing the salt concentration in suitable salt–solvent combinations, offering technical superiority in numerous figures of merit over alternative materials. This long-awaited, extremely simple yet effective strategy can overcome most of the remaining hurdles limiting the present lithium-ion batteries without sacrificing manufacturing efficiency, and hence its impact is now widely felt in the scientific community, with serious potential for industrial development. This Review aims to provide timely and objective information that will be valuable for designing better realistic batteries, including a multi-angle analysis of their advantages and disadvantages together with future perspectives. Emphasis is placed on the pathways to address the remaining technical and scientific issues rather than re-highlighting the many technical advantages.

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Fig. 1: Overview of a conventional dilute electrolyte and salt-concentrated electrolyte.
Fig. 2: Advanced battery functions realized by concentrated electrolytes.
Fig. 3: Mechanism of ion transport.
Fig. 4: Diluting concentrated electrolytes with a low-polarity solvent.
Fig. 5: SEI formation process in a concentrated electrolyte.
Fig. 6: Computational methodologies for electrolyte analyses.
Fig. 7: Multi-angle comparison of three types of electrolyte.

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  • 26 March 2019

    An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Yamada, Y., Wang, J., Ko, S. et al. Advances and issues in developing salt-concentrated battery electrolytes. Nat Energy 4, 269–280 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0336-z

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