仿生能源与储能系统团队

Lithium metal battery (LMB) is a rechargeable battery using high specific-capacity lithium as an anode. It can potentially break the specific energy-density bottleneck of the current lithium ion battery technology due to its high energy-density property. However, the formation of dendrite at lithium metal anode limits the application of LMB. As a result, achieving non-dendritic Li deposition is generally believed to be a prerequisite for the successful commercialization of LMB.

Although a great deal of research aiming at dendritic-free Li plating has been conducted and a variety of strategies to prevent Li dendrite formation have been published. Nevertheless, the following question arises: are dendrite-free Li based anodes sufficient to propel the LMB technology from laboratory research to massive industrial commercialization?

Toward this question, a research team from Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has recently published a short communication paper in Materials Today.

In their previous work, the authors have studied the working principles and decaying mechanisms of LMBs. They found that the irreversible transformation of Li anode during electrochemical cycling was the root cause for the observed battery performance deterioration.

On the basis of past studies, the authors revealed that eliminating the growth of the dendritic Li structure seemed not to be sufficient to propel the LMB technology from laboratory research to practical applications considering that other types of the electrochemically generated Li structures besides the dendritic structure had generated, instead.

As a result, the authors suggested that considerable research effort was to be focused on studying the electrochemical nature of the generated Li structures, in addition to finding novel strategies to eradicate them.

Fig.: A variety of electrochemically-generated Li morphologies. (Image by SUN Fu, DONG Shanmu)