Lithium single ion conductors are a class of electrolytes, typically designed for lithium ion batteries, with the potential to improve the performance of these batteries. The benefits of single ion conductors arise out of the fact that their immobile anions are not capable of concentrating near the anode of the battery, causing an increase in resistance as the battery is discharged. Unfortunately lithium single ion conductors suffer severe drawbacks in their conductivity which have been attributed to diverse causes. Because of the low success rate of single ion conductors in the literature and previous work in the Baker group, I have chosen to investigate mechanistic questions related to the design and construction of these materials, without engineering new materials. An attractive design strategy for the screening of immobile anion moieties for single ion conductors would be the use of the copper catalyzed alkyne azide (CUAAC) "click" reaction in order to efficiently introduce anions onto a polymer or nanoparticle support in a way that is efficient and tunable. A variable added by this strategy would be the presence of a 1,2,3-triazole moiety which is without any significant precedent in the lithium ion electrolyte literature. In order to assess the impact of the triazole in on the conductivity of an electrolyte a series of model compounds were synthesized containing a variable number of triazoles in an otherwise poly(ethylene glycol) like oligomer chain. The model compounds were subjected to differential scanning calorimetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and in one case single crystal X-ray diffraction, and solvent shells were modeled for lithium with and without triazoles using ab initio quantum chemistry calculations. It was concluded that the triazole is not significantly stronger than an ether oxygen as a ligand in the electrolytes, however the triazole has a substantial dipole which exerts some deleterious effects on the conductivity, leading to an increase in the Arrhenius activation energy for the process. These effects are balanced by an increase in the pre-exponential factor which leads to "compensation behavior" due to the dependence of that quantity on the dipole density in the material. The observed effect is one of a lower conductivity for the model compounds relative to poly(ethylene glycol)dimethyl ether 500 at room temperature, which converges to roughly the same conductivity around 80 °C. In synthetic studies, attempts were made to synthesize N-triflylpropanesultam (TPS) a five membered heterocycle whose nucleophilic ring opening would yield a desirable anion for use in single ion conductors. TPS proved to be significantly more difficult to open than expected, which prompted a computational study. In order to study the nucleofugality of polyatomic anionic leaving groups derived from oxygen and nitrogen, a contingent of 19 methylating agents consisting of amines or alcohols activated with carbonyl or sulfonyl substituents has been examined via ab initio calculations. Gas phase activation energies for alkylation of ammonia, and gas phase methyl cation affinitys were calculated. It was found that polyatomic anionic leaving groups derived from nitrogen will have higher activation energies for Menshutkin (SN2) alkylation even when they have similar methyl cation affinities. This inherent deficit in the nucleofugality of nitrogen derived leaving groups appears to be a result of the way bond cleavage is synchronized with bond formation to the incoming ammonia nucleophile. Additionally the second sulfonyl group present in a sulfonimide appears to be less effective at activating nitrogen due to a preference for tetrahedral geometries at nitrogen in the transition states of sulfonamide groups. Optimal delocalization of electron density is therefore frustrated due to the symmetry of the leaving group.
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