An electrolyte study on Na2BDA anode for Na-based organic batteries

Energy production and storage plays a key role in the development of portable devices, hybrid and electric vehicles and in the energy storage system for renewable energy, such as wind and solar resources. Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) dominate the global market on these, but the geographically constrained resources and the difficult extraction of metallic lithium lead to prices increment, removing the idea of low-cost technologies. An alternative on lithium technology is sodium, very abundant, cheap and with suitable electrochemical properties, close to those of lithium. A lot of work on sodium technology has to be done in order to catch up with lithium. Electrode materials research is the first step which must be done for meet the high energy storage demand. At the moment the most common chemistries used in batteries are based on inorganic compounds (e. g. LiCoO2, LiMn2O4, Li4Ti5O12, etc…), that are expensive and synthesized from high temperature reactions, and also the end-of-life treatment is difficult and energy greedy. One possible approach as alternative is switching to the organic based materials, in which a lot of synthesis routes can be chosen and a lots of compounds can be synthesized. Furthermore, the possibility to prepare materials from recyclable organic materials (e. g. biomass) is really appealing. However, organic compounds are often associated with drawbacks such as poor conductivity, low energy density and high solubility in liquid electrolytes. Especially for the last point an accurate study on the electrolytes involved in the batteries is mandatory, because is well known how the ion-transport media affect the performances of the batteries system. In this work we present an overview on our recent results on using disodium benzenediacrylate (Na2BDA) as electrode material for Na-based organic batteries, in different electrolyte media. In particular, the galvanostatic cycling behaviors in NaǀelectrolyteǀNa2BDA pouch-cell configuration are shown