A Highly Stable Practical Li Metal Anode via Interphase Regulation and Nucleation Induction

The practical utilization of Li metal anodes has been significantly plagued by the challenges of uncontrollable dendritic Li growth and poor interphase instability. Here, the study reports a novel strategy to strengthen interphase and give highly efficient active seeds concurrently to stabilize Li metal via a highly lithiophilic In2O3 decorated porous scaffold. In situ configurated fast-ion-transport Li2O-strengthened interphase layer cooperatively with highly efficient Li13In3 nucleation induction can endow the uniform Li nucleation/growth and high Li utilization efficiency. As a result, the achieved modified Li metal manifests high Coulombic efficiency, ultrahigh rate performance (5 mA cm-2), and ultra-long lifespan cycling durability (7975 cycles). Importantly, the established Li|LiFePO4 cells exhibit long-term cycling durability over 600 cycles at 1 C with an ultralow decay rate of ca. 0.017% per cycle. Moreover, the Li|LiCoO2 pouch cells with ultrahigh areal capacity of ca. 3.89 mAh cm-2 also exhibit extraordinarily prolonged cycling performance with excellent capacity retention despite extremely harsh cycling conditions of low negative-to-positive-capacity (N/P) ratio of ca. 1.7 and lean electrolyte of ca. 4.9 g Ah-1. This work enlightens a facile and effective avenue toward highly stable Li metal anode toward reliable practicability. A highly stable Li metal anode via interphase regulation coordinated with nucleation induction using robust In2O3 modified scaffold has successfully been prepared. An in situ configured fast-ion-transport Li2O-strengthened interphase with highly efficient Li13In3 nucleation induction synergistically enables highly reversible Li plating/stripping and homogeneous Li nucleation/growth. This work demonstrates a simple, efficient, and promising strategy paving Li metal toward more practicability. image