While efforts continue to achieve longer lasting, safer and more energy dense lithium batteries with engineering solutions and new materials, none address the single greatest vulnerability in the lithium battery – the conventional organic carbonate electrolytes. These organic electrolytes: 1) are highly volatile, which causes them to evaporate rapidly even at low temperatures; 2) are highly flammable, which causes them to vaporize and burn in air more easily and rapidly than gasoline; 3) are not thermally stable, causing them to decompose when heated – even if no fire occurs; and 4) have an extremely narrow electrochemical window of stability meaning they decompose when the battery is either highly charged OR nearly discharged, which limits the voltage ranges that can be used. Furthermore, these fluids are highly vulnerable to the heat generated in the battery under normal operating conditions.

Specifically, these carbonate-based electrolytes are subject to thermal and electrochemical degradation. These properties in turn limit deployment of high-capacity anode and cathode electrode designs and impose the necessity of onerous thermal management systems to avoid disastrous safety consequences of this degradation. This also results in curtailed battery life. All of these factors prohibit the realization of higher energy density batteries. Hence, the full potential of lithium batteries is severely limited as long as they continue to rely on these conventional organic (carbonate-based) electrolytes. To overcome this current situation, there’s  increasing awareness that the solution is to replace the organic carbonates  with new materials – namely, inorganic fluids.

New Dominion Enterprises (NDE) is leading the way by developing such novel inorganic fluids, expressly designed to be suitable as superior electrolyte solvents. As such, incorporation of NDE's inorganic fluid with lithium battery electrolytes addresses many limitations of conventional organic electrolytes.