Ceramic/polymer composite solid electrolytes are emerging as a good strategy to improve the safety and the power density of next-generation battery technologies. This battery technology is, however, limited by the high interfacial resistance across the ceramic/polymer interface at room temperature.
Our work proposes a novel and realiable method to make ceramic/polymer electrolytes for application in solid state lithium batteries, which can also be applied to other ceramic and polymer systems.
One such example is the interface between lithium metal anode and ceramic solid electrolyte in all-solid-state batteries operated at ambient conditions.
The ceramic-in-polymer system is the main trend in composite-electrolyte studies because of its easier film processability. Ceramic-in-polymer electrolytes (CPE) with relatively low ceramic loading have higher room-temperature conductivities (10 −5 to 10 −6 S cm −1) compared to polymer electrolytes without ceramic filler (10 −7 to 10 −8 S cm −1 ).
For ceramic electrolytes, considering the intrinsically wide electrochemical stability windows of garnet and other oxide-based electrolytes, we believe in their large-scale applications in all-solid-state batteries.
The key bottlenecks for their future development are interface contact, compatibility issue with high-voltage cathodes, and processing cost. For high-temperature ceramic electrolytes, oxygen ion conducting ones are the choices for a number of technologies such as oxygen sensors and SOFCs/SOECs.