Reported By: Department of Physics
Translated By: HU Yujia
Edited By: Jonathan Wylie
On December 4th, “Dendrite-Free Lithium Deposition with Self-Aligned Nanorod Structure,” authored by associate professor ZHANG Yaohui of HIT’s Department of Physics, along with the Department of Physics of HIT, was published in Nano Letters. Nano Letters is an internationally renowned academic journal with an annual impact factor in 2013 of 12.94, and a 5-year impact factor of 14.45, highlighting the journal’s position in the academic journal world.
Metallic lithium has a very high theoretical specific capacity (3860 mAh/g), the most negative redox potential (-3.04 V with respect to the standard hydrogen potential) and minimum density (0.59 g/cm3). Therefore, in recent years, metallic lithium has been regarded as a kind of competitive high-capacity secondary battery anode material. With the growing global shortage of fossil energy, development of high-capacity secondary batteries with metallic lithium as the negative electrode has come to the forefront of international research again. However, it is easy to form metallic lithium dendrites in the battery charging process and cause battery thermal failure or explosion, a problem which has had no effective solution for more than 40 years. Associate Professor ZHANG’s succeeded in electro deposition of non dendrite bright metal lithium electrodes in liquid electrolytes to solve this problem. In addition, the research first discovered the growth of dendrite-free lithium films with a self-aligned and highly compacted nanorod structure, which is different from formal research and predictions that metallic lithium without dendrites would be a dense structure. The discovery of this compacted nanorod structure contributes to a correct understanding of lithium deposition/stripping processes, and promotes in-depth studies on suppressing lithium dendrite growth. Reviewers commented, “The images presented in the manuscript are gorgeous in terms of uniformity and smoothness. The results made in this paper are a great achievement.”
Associate Professor ZHANG Yaohui obtained bachelor and doctoral degrees at HIT successively in 2001 and 2006. After graduation he conducted two-year post-doctoral research work at South China University of Technology and recruited for HIT’s Department of Physics, School of Science. From September of 2012, Associate Professor ZHANG carried out a one-year term as a visiting researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, fully financed by the China Scholarship Council. Until now he has published more than 30 SCI papers in international journals such as the Chinese Journal of Power Sources, Journal of the American Ceramic Society, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Solid State Ionics, and International Journal of Applied Ceramic Technology. His main research directions include the physics of new energy materials, solid oxide fuel cells, and lithium-ion batteries.
Paper Link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/nl5039117
Non dendrite metallic lithium electrode (compacted nanorod structure)
