Anagrafe della ricerca

The ‘Next-Generation Redox POlymers for Lithium and POst-Lithium Organic BATTeries’ project (POLiBATT) focuses on the development of innovative materials for the preparation of high-performance organic electrodes that can find application in lithium and post-lithium organic batteries. Compared to the lithium-ion battery technology employed today, these latter offer several key advantages that may play an important role in the future of the energy transition. In particular, they do not need materials that are scarcely available and hardly recycled (such as Co), they can be obtained from abundant (and even green) resources, their properties can be tailored by means of chemical synthesis and they can offer superior specific capacity thanks to their intrinsic light weight. The materials proposed so far, however, still suffer important drawbacks, such as the limited lifetime, due to the non-negligible solubility of the active materials in the electrolyte, and the slow/incomplete discharging, which limits the power output. In the POLiBATT project we aim to overcome these limitations by employing novel fully-conjugated materials comprising efficient and reliable redox units that can grant the organic electrodes high-specific capacities, long lifetimes and fast kinetics. To achieve this goal, we will develop innovative synthetic strategies based on precursors chemistry that will allow the preparation of high-molecular weight, high-performant, conjugated materials without the need of solubilizing chains (which would affect negatively the specific capacity). Such materials would not be otherwise accessible by standard methodologies as, in most cases, the polymerization of flat, conjugated monomers often results in low-molecular weight, unprocessable materials. The use of highly soluble precursors can circumvent this issue, resulting in long polymeric chains and tailorable properties to meet process needs, and can be transformed to the final unprocessable target material only when necessary, by employing a high-yield reaction. In particular, during the POLiBATT project we will develop two complementary approaches involving different classes of polymeric precursors. One class will result in the synthesis of materials displaying the redox units along the main chain, while a second class aims to the preparation of conjugated chains comprising redox pendants. This grants a remarkable flexibility to the project and will allow the direct comparison of the properties and performances of the different designs. The efficacy of these materials will be tested and evaluated in Li and post-Li (K and Mg) cells. A synergistic interaction between the research units will allow a concerted effort toward the improvement of the performances of the batteries – from both a material and fabrication process perspective – resulting in devices which will be directly comparable to other technological benchmarks and able to function in real-world applications.