Improving electrical energy storage in extreme and atypical environments

Electrochemical energy storage (EES) devices like batteries are integral for many modern electronics. While much research has significantly improved the performance and safety of these devices, the majority of studies do not address their operation in harsh environments like extreme temperatures and external stress, which usually cause those same devices — found in many applications like space exploration, Antarctic research, flexible electronics, and more — to have poorer performance or safety issues.

In their review, Sun et al. discuss the behavior of electrochemical energy storage devices under harsh environments, including ultralow and ultrahigh temperatures and external magnetic fields. The review highlights the effects and mechanisms of such environments on the performance of EES devices, strategies for optimizing their degraded properties, and future directions.

“Enormous efforts are highly needed to overcome the existing fundamental and technological barriers, which require the joint efforts and cooperation of researchers in physics, chemistry, materials science and other fields,” author Changzhou Yuan said. “In this review, we systematically summarize the research progress in EES devices operating under particular service environments. We believe that the review will be of enormous significance for development of advanced EES devices for these service environments.”

The authors hope the review will inform EES researchers, both new and established, about certain applications, including power supplies under extreme temperatures, which could benefit from more rational design of active materials, electrolytes, binders, and other factors. The team also hopes to highlight how such environments affect electrochemical properties in terms of thermodynamic and kinetic processes, characterization methods to better understand these complex interactions, and the environmental friendliness, low cost, and scalability of EES devices.

Source: “Electrochemical energy storage devices under particular service environments: Achievements, challenges and perspective,” by Jinfeng Sun, Chanjuan Liu, Xinyu Song, Jinyang Zhang, Yang Liu, Longwei Liang, Ruiyu Jiang, and Changzhou Yuan, Applied Physics Reviews (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0086130 .