Pang Quanquan's team from the School of Materials has made important breakthroughs in the field of fast-charging molten salt aluminum batteries

Large-scale energy storage system is an important way to quickly and healthily realize China's "dual carbon" strategy

Electrochemical energy storage is currently mainly lithium-ion batteries, as well as the recent rise of sodium-ion batteries and flow batteries

Rechargeable aluminum batteries are a promising new generation of energy storage systems due to the low cost of aluminum anodes, high content of crustal elements, and high specific capacity

In response to this key issue, Pang Quanquan's team from the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Peking University and his collaborators reported for the first time a molten salt aluminum battery with high safety, non-flammability, ultra-low material cost, and fast charging

The authors found that the molten salt electrolyte composed of NaCl-KCl-AlCl ₃ contains various chain-like Al _n Cl _3n+1 - components, such as Al ₂ Cl ₇ - , Al ₃ Cl ₁₀ - and Al ₄ Cl ₁₃ - , the facile breakage of its Al-Cl-Al bond provides fast Al ^{desolubilization} kinetics, leading to an accompanying high Faradaic exchange current, which is the fundamental cause of fast battery charging

Figure 1.

The team first explored the reversible deposition/stripping behavior of aluminum anodes in molten salt electrolytes and the intrinsic redox electrochemical reactions of chalcogenide cathodes (S, Se, and Te), demonstrating that molten salt electrolytes have both positive and negative electrode side effects.

In addition, the team used in-situ synchrotron radiation X-ray near-edge absorption spectroscopy and in-situ X-ray diffraction techniques to reveal the multi-step conversion reaction mechanism of molten salt aluminum-selenium batteries

Figure 2.

The work was recently published in the journal Nature (Nature 2022, DOI: 10.

The link of Pang Quanquan's research group is: pang-eetl-pku.