Toward the understanding of water-in-salt electrolytes: Individual ion activities and liquid junction potentials in highly concentrated aqueous solutions

Highly concentrated electrolytes were recently proposed to improve the performances of aqueous electrochemical systems by delaying the water splitting and increasing the operating voltage for battery applications. While advances were made regarding their implementation in practical devices, debate exists regarding the physical origin for the delayed water reduction occurring at the electrode/electrolyte interface. Evidently, one difficulty resides in our lack of knowledge regarding ion activity arising from this novel class of electrolytes, which is necessary to estimate the Nernst potential of associated redox reactions, such as Li+ intercalation or the hydrogen evolution reaction. In this work, we first measured the potential shift of electrodes selective to Li+, H+, or Zn2+ ions from diluted to highly concentrated regimes in LiCl or LiTFSI solutions. Observing similar shifts for these different cations and environments, we establish that shifts in redox potentials from diluted to highly concentrated regimes originate in large from an increased junction potential, which is dependent on the ion activity coefficients that increase with the concentration. While our study shows that single ion activity coefficients, unlike mean ion activity coefficients, cannot be captured by any electrochemical means, we demonstrate that the proton concentration increases by one to two orders of magnitude from 1 to 15-20 mol kg(-1) solutions. Combined with the increased activity coefficients, this phenomenon increases the activity of protons and thus increases the pH of highly concentrated solutions which appears acidic.

Automated summary

The study investigates the application of highly concentrated electrolytes in aqueous electrochemical systems, finding that the potential shift from diluted to highly concentrated electrolytes mainly comes from an increased junction potential. As the concentration increases, the activity coefficients of cations also increase, leading to higher proton activity in highly concentrated solutions.