Structural ceramic batteries using an earth-abundant inorganic waterglass binder

Sodium trisilicate waterglass is an earth-abundant inorganic adhesive which binds to diverse materials and exhibits extreme chemical and temperature stability. Here we demonstrate the use of this material as an electrode binder in a lay-up based manufacturing system to produce structural batteries. While conventional binders for structural batteries exhibit a trade-off between mechanical and electrochemical performance, the waterglass binder is rigid, adhesive, and facilitates ion transport. The bulk binder maintains a Young’s modulus of >50 GPa in the presence of electrolyte solvent while waterglass-based electrodes have high rate capability and stable discharge capacity over hundreds of electrochemical cycles. The temperature stability of the binder enables heat treatment of the full cell stack following lay-up shaping in order to produce a rigid, load-bearing part. The resulting structural batteries exhibit impressive multifunctional performance with a package free cell stack-level energy density of 93.9 Wh/kg greatly surpassing previously published structural battery materials, and a tensile modulus of 1.4 GPa.