Ab Initio Simulations and Electronic Structure of Lithium-Doped Ionic Liquids: Structure, Transport, and Electrochemical Stability

JB Haskins and CW Bauschlicher and JW Lawson, JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY B, 119, 14705-14719 (2015).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.5b06951

Density functional theory (DFT), density functional theory molecular dynamics (DFT-MD), and classical molecular dynamics using polarizable force fields (PFF-MD) are employed to evaluate the influence of Li+ oft the structure, transport, and electrochemical stability of three potential ionic liquid electrolytes: N-methyl-N-butylpytroliditium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)-imide (pyr14TFSI), N-methyl-N- propylpyrrolidinium bis(fluorosulfonyl)-imide (pyr13FSI), and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium boron tetrafluoride (EMIMBF4). We characterize the Li+ solvation shell through DFT computations Of Li(Anion)(n)((n-1)-) clusters, DFT-MD simulations of isolated Li+ in small ionic liquid systems, and PFF-MD simulations with high Li-doping levels in large ionic liquid systems. At low levels of Li-salt doping, highly stable solvation shells having two to three anions are seen in both pyr14TFSI and pyr13FSI) whereas solvation shells with four anions dominate in EMIM BF4. At higher levels of doping, we find the formation of complex Li-network structures that increase the frequency of four anion-coordinated solvation shells. A comparison of computational and experimental Raman spectra for a wide range of Li-(Anion)(n)((n-1)-) clusters shows that our proposed structures are consistent with experiment. We then compute the ion diffusion coefficients and find measures from small-cell DFT-MD simulations to be the correct order of magnitude, but influenced by small system size and short simulation length. Correcting for these errors with complementary PFF-MD simulations, we find DPT-MD measures to be in close agreement with experiment. Finally, we compute electrochemical windows from DFT computations on isolated ions, interacting cation/anion pairs, and liquid-phase systems with Li-doping. For the molecular-level computations, we generally find the difference between ionization energy and electron affinity from isolated ions and interacting cation/anion pairs to provide upper and lower bounds, respectively, to experiment. In the liquid phase, we find the difference between the lowest unoccupied and highest occupied electronic levels in pure and hybrid functionals to provide lower and upper bounds, respectively, to experiment. Li-doping in the liquid-phase systems results in electrochemical windows little changed from the heat systems.

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