Measuring and enhancing the ionic conductivity of chloroaluminate electrolytes for Al-ion batteries

At the core of the aluminum (Al) ion battery is the liquid electrolyte, which governs the underlying chemistry. Optimizing the rheological properties of the electrolyte is critical to advance the state of the art. In the present work, the chloroaluminate electrolyte is made by reacting AlCl3 with a recently reported acetamidinium chloride (Acet-Cl) salt in an effort to make a more performant liquid electrolyte. Using AlCl3:Acet-Cl as a model electrolyte, we build on our previous work, which established a new method for extracting the ionic conductivity from fitting voltammetric data, and in this contribution, we validate the method across a range of measurement parameters in addition to highlighting the model electrolytes’ conductivity relative to current chloroaluminate liquids. Specifically, our method allows the extraction of both the ionic conductivity and voltammetric data from a single, simple, and routine measurement. To bring these results in the context of current methods, we compare our results to two independent standard conductivity measurement techniques. Several different measurement parameters (potential scan rate, potential excursion, temperature, and composition) are examined. We find that our novel method can resolve similar trends in conductivity to conventional methods, but typically, the values are a factor of two higher. The values from our method, on the other hand, agree closely with literature values reported elsewhere. Importantly, having now established the approach for our new method, we discuss the conductivity of AlCl3:Acet-Cl-based formulations. These electrolytes provide a significant improvement (5–10× higher) over electrolytes made from similar Lewis base salts (e.g., urea or acetamide). The Lewis base salt precursors have a low economic cost compared to state-of-the-art imidazolium-based salts and are non-toxic, which is advantageous for scale-up. Overall, this is a noteworthy step at designing cost-effective and performant liquid electrolytes for Al-ion battery applications.