The development and deployment of electrochemical energy storage is an important milestone towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The key components of batteries and supercapacitors are energy storage materials, which store chemical energy, and electrolytes, which provide the ionic transport necessary to convert this chemical energy into electrical energy. A major challenge for the development of the industry is the development of key energy storage components - new safe, environmentally friendly and low-cost electrolytes and active materials that provide competitive performance in finished batteries.

Due to their wide range of stability potentials, organic electrolytes make it possible to create batteries and supercapacitors with high operating voltages and thus stored energy. However, the organic solvents that make up such electrolytes are neither environmentally friendly (both in use and disposal) nor safe (as evidenced by the statistics of fires and associated economic losses). For this reason, attempts are being made to develop various alternative water-based electrolytes, including superconcentrated electrolytes (or otherwise "water-in-salt" electrolytes), which make it possible to overcome the disadvantages of both traditional aqueous ("salt-in-water") electrolytes (narrow voltage range, presence of side reactions, poor compatibility with a number of materials susceptible to hydrolysis) and organic electrolytes (already mentioned fire and environmental hazards, toxicity, difficulty of production and disposal).

While the shift from organic electrolytes to water-in-salt systems for electrolytes will lead to an increase in environmental friendliness and simpler and cheaper production and disposal of devices, the opposite is true for electrode materials. The inorganic materials traditionally used in all types of batteries contain heavy metals, require high-temperature synthesis techniques for production and complex disposal conditions, and therefore do not meet today's demands for environmental friendliness and energy efficiency in battery production. In this context, a rapidly developing area of research is the use of organic electrode materials in batteries to replace inorganic materials in a number of niche applications, such as flexible and wearable devices. The use of organic materials eliminates a number of these problems: organic materials are typically cheaper to produce and the raw materials for their synthesis can be derived from renewable sources. In addition, the disposal of such electrodes poses fewer environmental risks.

In this project, we will investigate the possibility of creating energy storage devices that combine two areas of research - organic electrode materials and superconcentrated electrolytes. Despite the obvious promise of this combination, such systems are virtually unexplored. The main objective of this project is to directly demonstrate the fundamental feasibility of combining organic electrode materials and superconcentrated electrolytes as components of batteries and/or hybrid supercapacitors. Related challenges include the design of both electrolyte and electrode materials, as well as achieving the best functional performance of the devices, including specific capacity and energy, cyclic stability and recharge rate. The outcome of the project will be a new direction for the development of efficient and safe energy storage devices.

The completion of the project will enable a better understanding of electrochemical systems based on superconcentrated electrolytes and organic electrode materials. The applied implementation of the knowledge gained will enable the production and introduction of batteries into energy systems as part of the achievement of sustainable development goals. Specific deliverables of the ongoing project include