Toward High-Quality Sulfide Solid Electrolytes: A Liquid-Phase Approach Featured with an Interparticle Coupled Unification Effect.

Sulfide solid electrolytes (SSEs) are highly wanted for solid-state batteries (SSBs). While their liquid-phase synthesis is advantageous over their solid-phase strategy in scalable production, it confronts other challenges, such as low-purity products, user-unfriendly solvents, energy-inefficient solvent removal, and unsatisfactory performance. This article demonstrates that a suspension-based solvothermal method using single oxygen-free solvents can solve those problems. Experimental observations and theoretical calculations together show that the basic function of suspension-treatment is "interparticle-coupled unification", that is, even individually insoluble solid precursors can mutually adsorb and amalgamate to generate uniform composites in nonpolar solvents. This anti-intuitive concept is established when investigating the origins of impurities in SSEs electrolytes made by the conventional tetrahydrofuran-ethanol method and then searching for new solvents. Its generality is supported by four eligible alkane solvents and four types of SSEs. The electrochemical assessments on the former three SSEs show that they are competitive with their counterparts in the literature. Moreover, the synthesized SSEs presents excellent battery performance, showing great potential for practical applications.

Investigation on the simultaneous inhibition of advanced glycation end products, 4-methylimidazole and hydroxymethylfurfural in thermal reaction meat flavorings by liquiritigenin, liquiritin and glycyrrhizic acid and possible pathways.

The inhibitory effects of liquiritigenin, liquiritin and glycyrrhizic acid against the hazards during the preparation of thermal reaction beef flavoring were investigated using high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). Liquiritigenin(1.5 mM) inhibited Nε-carboxymethyl-L-lysine and Nε-carboxyethyl-L-lysine by up to 38.69 % and 61.27 %, respectively; 1.5 mM liquiritin inhibited 4-methylimidazole by up to 48.28 %; and 1.5 mM liquiritigenin and 1.0 mM liquiritin inhibited hydroxymethylfurfural by up to 61.20 % and 59.31 %, respectively. The results of the model system showed that the inhibitory effect of the 3 inhibitors could be extended to other thermal reaction flavoring systems. The 3 inhibitors can effectively block key intermediates in beef flavoring, and liquiritigenin can inhibit up to 22.97 % of glyoxal and 22.89 % of methylglyoxal. In addition, liquiritigenin and liquiritin can directly eliminate up to 25.87 % and 21.01 % of methylglyoxal by addition and other means. Free radicals in the simultaneous formation model system were measured using electron spin resonance (ESR), and the results showed that liquiritigenin, liquiritin and glycyrrhizic acid could scavenge free radicals in the system in a dose-dependent manner, with scavenging rates of up to 44.88-57.09 %. Therefore, the inhibitory effects of the 3 inhibitors can be attributed to the intermediate blocking and free radical scavenging pathways.