In December 2024, the laboratory work for the ALBATROS project was completed. After finalizing and submitting the project report, all activities have officially come to an end. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to reflect on the achievements made over the past 3.5 years.
Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the project began in July 2021. Initially scheduled for three years, the project duration was later extended to 3.5 years. The project focused on developing alternative material systems for stationary battery storage, utilizing aluminum as the anode material to replace critical raw materials — hence the acronym ALBATROS (from the German project title).
IoLiTec’s primary contribution was the development of novel ionic liquids suitable as electrolytes for aluminum batteries. Together with our project partners — Fraunhofer IISB Erlangen, Technology Center for High Performance Materials (THM Freiberg) as project coordinator, the DECHEMA Research Institute (DFI Frankfurt), and the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at TU Bergakademie Freiberg (TUF-IAC) — various electrolytes were developed and tested.
In addition to our well-established catalogue products EMIM Cl-AlCl₃ (EP-0001, EP-0007) and BMIM Cl-AlCl3 (EP-0002, EP-0008), we investigated electrolyte systems based on urea, acetamide, and triethylammonium chloride. These deep eutectic solvents represent promising and cost-effective alternatives to the commonly used imidazolium salts. Furthermore, all developed electrolytes demonstrated promising performance in galvanic aluminum plating processes.
Another key focus of the project was the optimization of electrolyte synthesis. Thanks to newly developed apparatus, we are now capable of producing these electrolytes with high reproducibility and can scale the process to multi-kilogram batches. All electrolytes developed during the project are already commercially available via info@iolitec.de.
We would like to sincerely thank all our project partners for the productive collaboration, as well as Project Management Jülich and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for their support and funding. Funding number: 03XP0392B