We quantitatively investigate the role of voltage fluctuation in terms of different waveforms on the electrodeposition dynamics and morphology for varying electrolyte concentrations. Dependent on the electrolyte concentration, a wide range of morphologies ranging from highly branched dendrites to comparatively closed packed electrodeposits has been captured. We mechanistically map the deposition dynamics by image analysis and demonstrate the highly porous dendritic dynamics to be independent of external perturbation. Additionally, comparatively closed packed morphological features show significant sensitivity toward the frequency and nature of the waveforms. The results provide fundamental insights into the correlation between the time scales of voltage fluctuation and growth dynamics. We comprehensively analyze the effect of the waveform nature on the average deposition height and show sinusoidal fluctuation to be preferred over square and pulse for metal batteries for lower deposition heights.

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The formation of dendritic microstructures during the charging period of the battery is a critical phenomenon, hampering the sustainable utilization of energy-dense materials, such as alkaline metals as the electrode. We establish a new experimental setup and measure for tracking the dendritic tendency in real time to quantify the dendritic compression versus the conventional parameters of pulse duty cycle and frequency. In this regard, we close the scale gap between experiments (∼mm, ∼s) and affordable simulations (∼nm, ∼ms) by means of coarse-grained modeling. Analyzing the nonlinear variation of the investigated parameters versus the pulse and rest periods, we explain the limits where they remain effective, based on the formation/relaxation of the respective layers. The obtained results can be useful for designing the dendrite-resilient pulse parameters via the simultaneous utilization of experiments and simulations.

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