Explore novel fire-retardant additives for electrolyte to enhance battery fire safety

Lithium-ion batteries enable electric transportation, portable electronics, and grid storage, but fire safety remains a critical barrier to wider adoption. In rare but serious events, a battery can enter a self-accelerating heating process that drives rapid chemical breakdown and produces flammable gases, leading to ignition and cascading failures that threaten people, property, and critical infrastructure. This project advances a largely underexplored route to safer batteries: engineering non-flammable or low-flammability electrolytes using flame-retardant additives. The work will provide the scientific basis for electrolyte designs that raise the temperature at which decomposition begins and thereby reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure, improving safety for applications spanning transportation, aerospace, consumer devices, renewable energy storage, and medical technologies. The project will also provide research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate researchers as well as for high school teachers. The research will pursue three integrated objectives. First, it will quantify how flame-retardant additives affect electrochemical performance, including lithium-ion transport and the formation and composition of the protective surface layer that develops on battery electrodes during early cycling. Second, it will determine how these additives change thermal stability and ignition probability, and it will map the key reactions, rates, and heat-release processes that govern the onset and growth of runaway heating. Third, it will evaluate safety under abusive conditions and use the resulting mechanistic insights to develop and validate new electrolyte formulations that improve both safety and performance. A multidisciplinary, quantitative approach will link electrochemical testing with materials and surface characterization and thermal/ignition measurements to identify additive-electrolyte combinations that suppress flammability while maintaining efficient operation. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and open resources, while simultaneously providing training and mentorship that strengthens the future workforce in battery technology and energy storage. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.