FT-Raman spectroscopy study of solvent-in-salt electrolytes**Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB932300), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51222210, 51472268, and 11234013), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA09010300).

Abstract

Cation–anion interaction with different ratios of salt to solvent is investigated by FT-Raman spectroscopy. The fitting result of the C–N–C bending vibration manifests that the cation–anion coordination structure changes tremendously with the variation of salt concentration. It is well known that lithium-ion transport in ultrahigh salt concentration electrolyte is dramatically different from that in dilute electrolyte, due to high viscosity and strong cation–anion interaction. In ultrahigh salt concentrated “solvent-in-salt” electrolyte (SIS-7#), we found, on one hand, that the cation and anion in the solution mainly formed cation–anion pairs with a high Li+ coordination number (≥ 1), including intimate ion pairs (20.1%) and aggregated ion pairs (79.9%), which not only cause low total ionic conductivity but also cause a high lithium transference number (0.73). A possible lithium transport mechanism is proposed: in solvent-in-salt electrolytes, lithium ions’ direct movement presumably depends on Li-ion exchange between aggregated ion pairs and solvent molecules, which repeats a dissolving and re-complexing process between different oxygen groups of solvent molecules.