The ever-growing demand for advanced energy storage devices in portable electronics, electric vehicles and large scale power grids has triggered intensive research efforts over the past decade on lithium and sodium batteries. The key to improve their electrochemical performance and enhance the service safety lies in the development of advanced electrode, electrolyte, and auxiliary materials. Ionic liquids (ILs) are liquids consisting entirely of ions near room temperature, and are characterized by many unique properties such as ultralow volatility, high ionic conductivity, good thermal stability, low flammability, a wide electrochemical window, and tunable polarity and basicity/acidity. These properties create the possibilities of designing batteries with excellent safety, high energy/power density and long-term stability, and also provide better ways to synthesize known materials. IL-derived materials, such as poly(ionic liquids), ionogels and IL-tethered nanoparticles, retain most of the characteristics of ILs while being endowed with other favourable features, and thus they have received a great deal of attention as well. This review provides a comprehensive review of the various applications of ILs and derived materials in lithium and sodium batteries including Li/Na-ion, dual-ion, Li/Na–S and Li/Na–air (O₂) batteries, with a particular emphasis on recent advances in the literature. Their unique characteristics enable them to serve as advanced resources, medium, or ingredient for almost all the components of batteries, including electrodes, liquid electrolytes, solid electrolytes, artificial solid–electrolyte interphases, and current collectors. Some thoughts on the emerging challenges and opportunities are also presented in this review for further development.

The design of molecular sieves is vital for gas separation, but it suffers from a long-standing issue of slow adsorption kinetics due to the intrinsic contradiction between molecular sieving and diffusion within restricted nanopores. We report a molecular sieve ZU-609 with local sieving channels that feature molecular sieving gates and rapid diffusion channels. The precise cross-sectional cutoff of molecular sieving gates enables the exclusion of propane from propylene. The coexisting large channels constituted by sulfonic anions and helically arranged metal-organic architectures allow the fast adsorption kinetics of propylene, and the measured propylene diffusion coefficient in ZU-609 is one to two orders of magnitude higher than previous molecular sieves. Propylene with 99.9% purity is obtained through breakthrough experiments with a productivity of 32.2 L kg ⁻¹ .

Physisorption is a promising technology to cut cost for separating ethylene (C₂H₄) from ethane (C₂H₆), the most energy-intensive separation process in the petrochemical industry. However, traditional thermodynamically selective adsorbents exhibit limited C₂H₄/C₂H₆ selectivity due to their similar physiochemical properties, and the performance enhancement is typically at the expense of elevated adsorption heat. Here, we report highly-efficient C₂H₄/C₂H₆ adsorption separation in a phosphate-anion pillared metal-organic framework ZnAtzPO₄ exploiting the equilibrium-kinetic synergetic effect. The periodically expanded and contracted aperture decorated with electronegative groups within ZnAtzPO₄ enables effective trapping of C₂H₄ and impedes the diffusion of C₂H₆, offering an extraordinary equilibrium-kinetic combined selectivity of 32.4. The adsorption heat of C₂H₄ on ZnAtzPO₄ (17.3 to 30.0 kJ mol⁻¹) is substantially lower than many thermodynamically selective adsorbents because its separation capability only partially relies on thermodynamics. The separation mechanism was explored by computational simulations, and breakthrough experiments confirmed the excellent C₂H₄/C₂H₆ separation performance of ZnAtzPO₄.