Lithium-ion battery performance and lifetime depends significantly on the conducting salt in the battery electrolyte. In this publication, key properties of alternative novel imidazole salts to the commonly used highly conductive but thermally unstable lithium hexa-fluorophosphate salt were assessed.

The research focuses on characterising their ionic conductivity, viscosity, and self-diffusion coefficients. and the correlation between ion mobility, viscosity and ionicity. An X-Pulse benchtop NMR spectrometer confirmed the structure of salts and characterised their diffusion properties using 19F Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo NMR spectroscopy to determine the self-diffusion coefficients of the anions.

Helge Stein (recently appointed to the professorship of Digital Catalysis at Technical University of Munich) and collaborators at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Helmholtz Institute Ulm, Helmholtz Institute Münster and Warsaw University of Technology combined complementary spectroscopy and electrochemistry techniques with NMR.

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