Advanced Solid Polymer Electrolytes for Li-ion Batteries

The market for batteries is growing annualy at 10% and has been esitmated to be $40 billion. Rechargeable batteries represent a large and growing segement of this market. The governing component of the emerging Li-polymer battery the solid polymerelectrolyte (SPE) and its current composition is not acceptable. New materials are needed to overcome the weakness of the current SPE. The proposed effort seeks to bring the Li-polymer battery into the commercial marketplace by perfecting new polymersfor Li-polymer SPEs that were identified in the Phase I effort. These new polymers will offer dramatically improved ionic conductivity and cation transport. The Phase II effort will utilize computer aided molecular dynamics (MD) simualtions to refine thestructures of the new polymers and seek wasy to further imroving their performance. These MD studies will form the basis for deciding which materials to synthesize. SPEs will be formulated using these new polymers and characterized using standardelectroanalytical techniques. The better SPEs that emerge from these characterization studies will then be incorporated inot batteries for extensive battery testing to determine how these batteries compare with standard Li-ion batteries. The outcomewill be an SPE for use with a variety of lithium chemistries. Successful development of the proposed SPE will lead to its commercialization as the SPE for Li-polymer batteries. It is expected that the Li-polymer battery will grow in popularity at thesame pace as its liquid electrolyte Li-ion battery. This would mena that htese two battery systems will lead the hyge battery market and will eventually come to dominate the entire market.