Investigation on poly(acrylate-co-acrylamide) hydrogel polymer electrolyte with liquidlike ionic conductivity

Gel polymer electrolytes (GPE) have drawn much attention from researchers due to environmental pollution and safe problem resulting from battery leakage and corrosion from using liquid electrolyte recently. In order to solve the problems above and probe the applicability of the polymer gel electrolyte to alkaline secondary batteries such as metal-air battery, a new kind of hydrogel polymer electrolyte, poly(acrylate-co-acrylamide), was prepared successfully using acrylic acid, acrylamide and KOH aqueous solution as raw materials by solution polymerization process under mild reaction condition in the paper. In addition, the effect of reaction conditions was studied on the swelling ratio and conductivity of hydrogel polymer electrolyte. Besides, the optimized reaction parameters and the conduction mechanism of hydrogel polymer electrolyte were also discussed in the paper. The experimental results showed that the hydrogel polymer electrolyte, which was thoroughly swollen in the KOH aqueous solution, had a high conductivity that was up to 497 ms·cm−1 in 4M/L KOH solution at room temperature, and the conductive mechanism of hydrogel polymer electrolyte was ionic conductive.