(237a) Organic Batteries for a Circular Economy

Cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential ingredients in today’s lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), but their continued use presents economic, ethical, and environmental challenges. Society must now begin to consider the implications of a LIB’s full life cycle, including the carbon footprint, the economic and environmental costs, and material access. These challenges motivate the case for organic polymer batteries sourced from earth-abundant materials whose life cycle bears minimal impact on the environment. This presentation will discuss our latest advances in metal-free organic batteries and polymer-air batteries.

Metal-free organic polymer electrodes and their electrolyte interactions are first considered, along with the mechanism of the battery’s operation. It is shown that swelling of the non-conjugated redox-active polymer electrode is a major factor in the performance. Next, polymer-air batteries are discussed, in which we report an ultra-stable electrode based upon a conjugated rigid ladder polymer. We pay special attention to structure-property relationships that influence charge transfer. Specifically, computation predicts how these polymers swell and interact with electrolyte during charging, which backbone chemistry might promote charge transfer, and how spatial arrangement of charge groups is critical to kinetics. Taken together, there is immense opportunity for experimental and computational chemical engineers to influence the future direction of organic batteries for a circular economy.