Enabling isotropic Li growth via Li foil facet-engineering for high-performance Li metal batteries

Abstract

Notorious dendrite growth is the major cause of low coulombic efficiency and safety issues in Li metal batteries, which is highly related to the crystallographic features of Li crystals. Generally, Li dendrites tend to grow on the (110) crystal face with the lowest surface energy. However, the understanding of deposited Li morphology evolution is still unexplored in terms of the changes in the exposure possibility of various Li crystal faces. Herein, we report isotropic Li growth by minimizing the surface energy discrepancy of lithium crystal faces to induce homogeneous Li deposition. Using DFT calculations, the surface energy discrepancy decreased from 0.17 to 0.1 J cm⁻² after manipulation. The yielded dendrite-free Li anode exhibited long-term cycling for 4000 hours at 3 mA cm⁻² for 3 mA h cm⁻² in symmetric cells and exhibited extraordinary performance of up to 10 mA cm⁻² with a capacity of 10 mA h cm⁻². Moreover, 91.5% capacity retention was achieved in LFP full cells cycled at 1C for about 650 times.