Fundamental Studies of Ion Conducting Glasses: The Combined Use of NMR and Impedance Spectroscopies to Create Models of the Conduction Energy Landscapes in Solid Electrolytes

Thursday, 17 October 2019: 09:20
Room 223 (The Hilton Atlanta)
S. W. Martin, S. Kmiec (Iowa State University of Science & Technology), A. Shastri (Minnesota State University - Moorhead), and D. Watson (3M)
We have developed, over years of study, new ways to combine NMR with Impedance Spectroscopy measurements of fast ion conducting glasses to examine the details of the ion conduction energy landscape that ions experience in conduction process. The NMR measurements of spin-lattice relaxation rates probe all ions whether they reside in energy wells so deep as to render them essentially immobile or in energy wells so shallow that their occupation time comparable to the diffusive time between adjacent sites. Impedance spectroscopy measurements, on the other hand, measure only those mobile ions that create a measurable current on the time scale of the measurement, typically seconds to microseconds. We have exploited these different measurements of the different sets of populations of the mobile ions to extract accurate predictions of the mobile ion potential energy landscapes in glass. We have found that a Gaussian distribution about a mean activation energy can provide an accurate description of the energy landscape for all of the mobile (and immobile) ions. In this talk, we will summarize more recent measurements we have made on both Li and Na ion conducting glasses and show how our methods can be used to develop predictions of glass compositions that will optimize the ion conductivity in glass.