No Arabic abstract
Finding new ionic conductors that enable significant advancements in the development of energy-storage devices is a challenging goal of current material science. Aside of material classes as ionic liquids or amorphous ion conductors, the so-called plastic crystals (PCs) have been shown to be good candidates combining high conductivity and favourable mechanical properties. PCs are formed by molecules whose orientational degrees of freedom still fluctuate despite the material exhibits a well-defined crystalline lattice. Here we show that the conductivity of Li+ ions in succinonitrile, the most prominent molecular PC electrolyte, can be enhanced by several decades when replacing part of the molecules in the crystalline lattice by larger ones. Dielectric spectroscopy reveals that this is accompanied by a stronger coupling of ionic and reorientational motions. These findings, which can be understood in terms of an optimised revolving door mechanism, open a new path towards the development of better solid-state electrolytes.
Many plastic crystals, molecular solids with long-range, center-of-mass crystalline order but dynamic disorder of the molecular orientations, are known to exhibit exceptionally high ionic conductivity. This makes them promising candidates for applications as solid-state electrolytes, e.g., in batteries. Interestingly, it was found that the mixing of two different plastic-crystalline materials can considerably enhance the ionic dc conductivity, an important benchmark quantity for electrochemical applications. An example is the admixture of different nitriles to succinonitrile, the latter being one of the most prominent plastic-crystalline ionic conductors. However, until now only few such mixtures were studied. In the present work, we investigate succinonitrile mixed with malononitrile, adiponitrile, and pimelonitrile, to which 1 mol% of Li ions were added. Using differential scanning calorimetry and dielectric spectroscopy, we examine the phase behavior and the dipolar and ionic dynamics of these systems. We especially address the mixing-induced enhancement of the ionic conductivity and the coupling of the translational ionic mobility to the molecular reorientational dynamics, probably arising via a revolving-door mechanism.
Management of heat during charging and discharging of Li-ion batteries is critical for their safety, reliability, and performance. Understanding the thermal conductivity of the materials comprising batteries is crucial for controlling the temperature and temperature distribution in batteries. This work provides systemic quantitative measurements of the thermal conductivity of three important classes of solid electrolytes (oxides, sulfides, and halides) over the temperature range 150-350 K. Studies include the oxides Li1.5Al0.5Ge1.5(PO4)3 and Li6.4La3Zr1.4Ta0.6O12, sulfides Li2S-P2S5, Li6PS5Cl, and Na3PS4, and halides Li3InCl6 and Li3YCl6. Thermal conductivities of sulfide and halide solid electrolytes are in the range 0.45-0.70 W m-1 K-1; thermal conductivities of Li6.4La3Zr1.4Ta0.6O12 and Li1.5Al0.5Ge1.5(PO4)3 are 1.4 W m-1 K-1 and 2.2 W m-1 K-1, respectively. For most of the solid electrolytes studied in this work, the thermal conductivity increases with increasing temperature; i.e., the thermal conductivity has a glass-like temperature dependence. The measured room-temperature thermal conductivities agree well with the calculated minimum thermal conductivities indicating the phonon mean-free-paths in these solid electrolytes are close to an atomic spacing. We attribute the low, glass-like thermal conductivity of the solid electrolytes investigated to the combination of their complex crystal structures and the atomic-scale disorder induced by the materials processing methods that are typically needed to produce high ionic conductivities.
A solid conducts heat through both transverse and longitudinal acoustic phonons, but a liquid employs only longitudinal vibrations. Here, we report that the crystalline solid AgCrSe2 has liquid-like thermal conduction. In this compound, Ag atoms exhibit a dynamic duality that they are exclusively involved in intense low-lying transverse acoustic phonons while they also undergo local fluctuations inherent in an order-to-disorder transition occurring at 450 K. As a consequence of this extreme disorder-phonon coupling, transverse acoustic phonons become damped as approaching the transition temperature, above which they are not defined anymore because their lifetime is shorter than the relaxation time of local fluctuations. Nevertheless, the damped longitudinal acoustic phonon survives for thermal transport. This microscopic insight might reshape the fundamental idea on thermal transport properties of matter and facilitates the optimization of thermoelectrics.
We have performed a dielectric investigation of the ionic charge transport and the relaxation dynamics in plastic-crystalline 1-cyano-adamantane (CNA) and in two mixtures of CNA with the related plastic crystals adamantane or 2-adamantanon. Ionic charge carriers were provided by adding 1% of Li salt. The molecules of these compounds have nearly globular shape and, thus, the so-called revolving-door mechanism assumed to promote ionic charge transport via molecular reorientations in other PC electrolytes, should not be active here. Indeed, a comparison of the dc resistivity and the reorientational alpha-relaxation times in the investigated PCs, reveals complete decoupling of both dynamics. Similar to other PCs, we find a significant mixing-induced enhancement of the ionic conductivity. Finally, these solid-state electrolytes reveal a second relaxation process, slower than the alpha-relaxation, which is related to ionic hopping. Due to the mentioned decoupling, it can be unequivocally detected and is not superimposed by the reorientational contributions as found for most other ionic conductors.
Crystal plasticity is mediated through dislocations, which form knotted configurations in a complex energy landscape. Once they disentangle and move, they may also be impeded by permanent obstacles with finite energy barriers or frustrating long-range interactions. The outcome of such complexity is the emergence of dislocation avalanches as the basic mechanism of plastic flow in solids at the nanoscale. While the deformation behavior of bulk materials appears smooth, a predictive model should clearly be based upon the character of these dislocation avalanches and their associated strain bursts. We provide here a comprehensive overview of experimental observations, theoretical models and computational approaches that have been developed to unravel the multiple aspects of dislocation avalanche physics and the phenomena leading to strain bursts in crystal plasticity.