Anti-Freezing Strategies of Electrolyte and their Application in Electrochemical Energy Devices

Abstract

Wider scenes of human's activities under low temperature demand promising performance of anti-freezing electrochemical energy devices, and the promotion of performance is mainly limited by electrolyte. However, despite many relevant research works reported, there are still few reviews that systematically and comprehensively summarize these modified approaches and applications. In this focus review, we classify the prominent anti-freezing strategies as high concentration aqueous electrolyte, organic additives, organic electrolyte and others. Relevant research works have been put to clarify their anti-freezing mechanisms and exhibit the modification effects. Besides, various energy devices including metal-air batteries, non-gas batteries and supercapacitors which employed aforementioned strategies are discussed and their key low-temperature performance indexes are summarized to exhibit the advanced research progress. Finally, we put forward some remaining challenges of these modification strategies toward practical application and propose prospects on future development of low-temperature electrochemical energy devices.

Keywords: anti-freezing; electrochemical energy device; high concentration electrolyte; low temperature; metal-ion batteries.