Effect of Liquid Metal Coating on Improved Cycle Performance of Anode-Free Lithium Metal Battery

Abstract

Although Li-ion battery is one of the most widely used energy storage devices, there have been extensive efforts to push its limit to meet the ever increasing demands to increase its energy density for applications such as electric vehicles, portable electronics, and grid storages. Here, Lithium metal anode plays a key role in the next generation energy storage devices, ultimately removing the Li metal anode in the initial state with the anode-free configuration. However, there are major challenges that need to be overcome. These include low Coulombic efficiency and formation of dendrites. In this work, we adopted gallium-based liquid metal (LM) as a coating layer on a copper current collector to uniformly deposit Li to prevent the dendrite formation and inmprove the cycle efficiency. The LM coating effectively improved the cycle performance in the anode-free configuration combined with Li(Ni,Co,Mn)O2 cathode. The effect of the LM coating was confirmed by in situ transmission electron microscopy and optical microscopy observations. LM reduced the charge/discharge overpotentials with its high affinity with lithium. It also contributed to decompose the dendritic lithium in the discharge process reducing the dead lithium disconnected from the current collector.

Highly Reversible Lithium Host Materials for High‐Energy‐Density Anode‐Free Lithium Metal Batteries

“…[ 14–18 ] As displayed in Figure b, the operation current density and the areal capacity of the anode‐free cells with BPEI‐Ag/LiNO 3 were higher than the previously reported values for liquid electrolyte‐based anode‐free cells. [ 7b,10,11,12a,13a,38 ] Figure 6a displays the cycling performance of the full cell of BPEI‐Ag/LiNO 3 electrode, and the voltage profiles were revealed in Figure S18 (Supporting Information). When bare Cu was used as an anode, the cell capacity steadily degraded with CE fluctuation.…”

Interfacial interaction-induced super-wettability of gallium-based liquid metals: a review

“…For example, when galinstan is applied to Cu foil at a certain surface density when preparing lithium metal batteries, galinstan exhibits good wettability on Cu foil and, eventually, a smooth galinstan film covers the rough Cu surface. 51 But the fundamental wetting mechanism has not attracted much attention from researchers. A sensor was prepared using LM by Li et al 52 In the process of designing the electronic components in the sensor, the unoxidized galinstan selectively wetted Cu patterns, and various complex LM patterns were obtained.…”

Liquid Metal Electrode Ink for Printable Lithium‐Ion Batteries

“…Liquid metals based on gallium (Ga), such as GaIn, Galinstan, and GaSn, exist in a liquid state at room temperature and are highly biocompatible with high conductivities (≈10 4 S cm À1 ). [14] Ga-based liquid metals have been used as alloy-type active materials, [15][16][17] lithium-metal anode coatings, [18,19] and current collector layers [20] in battery research. However, liquid metal has not yet been used as an ink for positive and negative battery electrodes in which the reaction layer and current collector are integrated.…”