Nanoscale Confinement Effects on Ionic Conductivity of Solid Polymer Electrolytes: The Interplay between Diffusion and Dissociation

Abstract

Solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) are attractive for next-generation lithium metal batteries but still suffer from low ionic conductivity. Nanostructured materials offer design concepts for SPEs with better performance. Using molecular dynamics simulation, we examine SPEs under nanoscale confinement, which has been demonstrated to accelerate the transport of neutral molecules such as water. Our results show that while ion diffusion indeed accelerates by more than 2 orders of magnitude as the channel diameter decreases from 15 to 2 nm, the ionic conductivity does not increase significantly in parallel. Instead, the ionic conductivity shows a nonmonotonic variation, with an optimal value above, but on the same order as, its bulk counterparts. This trend is due to enhanced ion association with decreasing channel size, which reduces the number of effective charge carriers. This effect competes with accelerated ion diffusion, leading to the nonmonotonicity in ion conductivity.