Preparation of porous polyacrylonitrile membrane-based gel polymer electrolyte for solid-state supercapacitor

Abstract

Recently, solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) are of great current interest as substitutes to conventional liquid type electrolytes. Although the SPEs significantly alleviate the safety issues of the lithium-ion batteries based on conventional liquid electrolytes, they intrinsically exhibit low ion conductivity. In this study, a bicontinuous solid polymer electrolyte containing polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membrane and a mixture of succinonitrile (SN) and lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide was prepared with different molarities of the lithium salt. Porous PAN membrane was fabricated via a thermally induced phase separation method (TIPS). The PAN-based SPE exhibited the maximum ionic conductivity of ∼5.0 10−3 S/cm at the salt molarity of 1.0 M.