Gel Polymer Electrolytes for Electrochemical Energy Storage

TLDR

Flexible and wearable electronics demand safe, stable operation, and gel polymer electrolytes are favored over liquid electrolytes for their higher safety and adaptability to flexible energy storage devices. The review aims to summarize recent advances in GPEs for electrochemical energy storage and outline future directions and challenges. It discusses functional GPEs that achieve unity lithium‑ion transference numbers, provide pseudocapacitance, and exhibit self‑protection, thermotolerance, and self‑healing properties.

Abstract

Abstract With the booming development of flexible and wearable electronics, their safety issues and operation stabilities have attracted worldwide attentions. Compared with traditional liquid electrolytes, gel polymer electrolytes (GPEs) are preferred due to their higher safety and adaptability to the design of flexible energy storage devices. This review summarizes the recent progress of GPEs with enhanced physicochemical properties and specified functionalities for the application in electrochemical energy storage. Functional GPEs that are capable to achieve unity lithium‐ion transference number and offer additional pseudocapacitance to the overall capacitance are carefully discussed. The smart GPEs with self‐protection, thermotolerant, and self‐healing abilities are particularly highlighted. To close, the future directions and remaining challenges of the GPEs for application in electrochemical energy storages are summarized to provide clues for the following development.