The role of electrolyte in governing the performance of protonic solid state battery

The solid-state proton conductor, P₂O₅.5H₂O, is found very difficult to handle due to presence of a very high content of moisture and corrosive nature. The addition of Al₂O₃ and SiO₂ into P₂O₅.5H₂O, forming composite electrolytes, obviates said drawback. The Zn + ZnSO₄ used as an anode to prepare cells with different cathode viz. I₂, MnO₂, PbO₂, and V₆O₁₃ characterized under different conditions. Open circuit voltage, discharge current and discharge time, on load voltage, discharge capacity, power density, and energy density are evaluated from discharge properties. Protonically conducting composite 70(P₂O₅.5H₂O)/30[(92SiO₂)/08(Al₂O₃)] is found to be the optimum combination with the optimized 50Zn/50ZnSO₄ as anode and 40MnO₂/60 graphite as cathode from secondary battery view point. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Ionic Devices (ICID 2006), Chennai, Tamilnadu, India, Dec. 7–9, 2006