There is an urgent demand to develop high-performance
flexible
batteries for a wide range of contemporary emerging fields, including
flexible electronics, wearable sensors, and implantable medical devices.
However, the inherent safety and stability issues of traditional organic
liquid-based electrolytes make their application in flexible batteries
unsatisfactory. Therefore, exploring gel electrolytes with superior
ionic conductivity and safety is considered to be the key to the development
of flexible batteries. In this paper, two types of high-quality ionic
liquid-based gel polymer electrolyte membranes (PVDF-ILs) are created
by a conventional solution-casting method, which are further integrated
into flexible aluminum-air batteries to guide the interface and process
research, and the related discharge properties of two ionic liquid-based
electrolyte membrane (PVDF-[C4mpyr]Cl, PVDF-[BMIM]Cl) in
different bending states are discussed. The results show that PVDF-ILs
have a rich pore structure and interwoven skeleton network, leading
to relatively high ionic conductivity (2.97 × 10–3 S cm–1). Moreover, two types of batteries can
meet the needs of flexibility, although there is a slight loss of
power density under various bending conditions. In general, a PVDF-[C4mpyr]Cl-based flexible aluminum-air battery is suitable for
the working conditions of high power and low bending angle, while
the PVDF-[BMIM]Cl-based flexible aluminum-air battery is favored for
microwatt low-power devices with high flexibility requirements.