The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will involve lowering the barrier to adoption of renewable energy generation and energy storage. The project seeks to take advantage the sheer abundance and low costs of sodium materials compared to state-of-the-art lithium materials. This will reduce upfront energy storage cost and in turn the payback time and costs of electricity for end users can be significantly reduced. The United States has 23 billion tons of domestic sodium reserves, which makes up 88% of the global supply of sodium. Successful utilization of the vast U.S. sodium reserves in new battery technologies will significantly reduce import reliance of critical materials and alleviate supply chain limitations on lithium-based materials. This project will accelerate the adoption of solar and renewable energy generation, making the grid cleaner, more sustainable, and more resilient.This research project advances new batteries enabled by a novel halide-based sodium solid state electrolyte. The technology offers several beneficial properties compared with conventional lithium-ion batteries: enhanced safety due to the use of completely nonflammable materials, higher volumetric energy density by using a dense alloy-based anode, lowered costs due to the abundance of sodium-based raw materials, and improved longevity from the use of superior halide-based solid-state electrolytes. Unlike the commonly used sulfide-based or oxide-based solid electrolyte materials, the halide-based innovation provides enhanced electrochemical and chemical stability while eliminating the need for high temperature sintering during fabrication. This project develops the halide solid electrolyte material, improving its baseline material ionic conductivity by 1-2 orders of magnitude, as well as exploring scalable synthesis routes using single-step fabrication at room temperature.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
