Engineering interfacial adhesion for high-performance lithium metal anode

Bingqing Xu, Zhe Liu, Jiangxu Li, Xin Huang, Boyu Qie, Tianyao Gong, Laiyuan Tan, Xiujia Yang, Daniel Paley, Martin Dontigny, Karim Zaghib, Xiangbiao Liao, Qian Cheng, Haowei Zhai, Xi Chen, Long Qing Chen, Ce Wen Nan, Yuan Hua Lin, Yuan Yang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

41 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Suppressing lithium dendrites in carbonate electrolyte remains a grand challenge for high voltage lithium metal batteries. The role of adhesion between the interfacial layer and the lithium metal in controlling lithium growth is often overlooked. Here, we find that the adhesion energy significantly influences lithium dendrite growth by the phase-field simulations, and LiAl is an attractive material with strong adhesion with lithium metal by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Then a simple solution process is developed to form conformal nanostructured LiAl interfacial layer on the lithium metal surface. With the nanostructured LiAl alloy-based interfacial layer, the Li/Li symmetric cell can be cycled stably for more than 1100 times at 5 mA/cm2, 1 mAh/cm2 with a low overpotential of 170 mV. For the LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2/Li full cell, this interfacial layer improves the capacity retention from 59.8% to 88.7% for 120 cycles at 1 C rate, and for the LiFePO4/Li system, the modified lithium anode also improves capacity retention from 79.5% to 99.4% after 150 cycles. This study represents a new approach to enhance the performance of lithium anode for rechargeable batteries with high voltage and high energy density.

Original languageEnglish
Article number104242
JournalNano Energy
Volume67
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Density functional theory (DFT) calculations
  • Interfacial engineering
  • Lithium metal anode
  • Phase-field simulation
  • Solid electrolyte interphase

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