Designing Highly Conductive Sodium-Based Metal Hydride Nanocomposites: Interplay between Hydride and Oxide Properties

Sodium-based complex hydrides have recently gained interest as electrolytes for all-solid-state batteries due to their light weight and high electrochemical stability. Although their room temperature conductivities are not sufficiently high for battery application, nanocomposite formation with metal oxides has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the ionic conductivity of complex hydrides. This enhancement is generally attributed to the formation of a space charge layer at the hydride-oxide interface. However, in this study it is found that the conductivity enhancement results from interface reactions between the metal hydride and the oxide. Highly conductive NaBH4 and NaNH2/oxide nanocomposites are obtained by optimizing the interface reaction, which strongly depends on the interplay between the surface chemistry of the oxides and the reactivity of the metal hydrides. Notably, for NaBH4, the best performance is obtained with Al2O3, while NaNH2/SiO2 is the most conductive NaNH2/oxide nanocomposite with conductivities of, respectively, 4.7 x 10(-5) and 2.1 x 10(-5) S cm(-1) at 80 degrees C. Detailed structural characterization reveals that this disparity originates from the formation of different tertiary interfacial compounds, and is not only a space charge effect. These results provide useful insights for the preparation of highly conductive nanocomposite electrolytes by optimizing interface interactions.