Title: Engineering polymer-based materials for carbon dioxide capture and lithium battery applications
Fundamentally, our research focuses on understanding the underlying structure-property relationships of functional, polymer composite materials that incorporate organic salts for application in lithium metal batteries and carbon dioxide capture technologies. Our ongoing work towards high energy density lithium metal batteries includes developing phosphonium-based solid polymer electrolytes that are mechanically resilient and have competitive room temperature ion transport properties. For example, PEG-segmented phosphonium ionenes have favorable properties that can be tuned by controlling the mol% incorporation of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). Ongoing work in this area includes the incorporation of fluorinated monomers that can increase electrochemical stability and preparing polymer composites with organic ionic plastic crystals to increase ionic conductivity. Our more recent work in carbon dioxide capture materials has focused on two distinct, yet promising, approaches to addressing an existential global crisis. Taking advantage of the ability of ionic liquids to adsorb carbon dioxide, we have developed (1) core-shell polymer microparticles with encapsulated ionic liquid, and (2) 3D-printed elastomeric ionogels that contain up to ≈30 mol% ionic liquid which can be prepared to specific shape requirements in minutes. Through encapsulation within a copolymer (styrene-co-myrcene) shell, we observed that the mass transport and rate of carbon dioxide absorption by the encapsulated ionic liquid depends on the chemical composition of the copolymer shell. In both the encapsulated microparticles and 3D-printed elastomeric ionogels, we observed an increase CO2/N2 selectivity which makes these materials potential candidates for removing carbon dioxide from flue gases generated by petrochemical plants.