“Lithium metal anode batteries are considered the holy grail of batteries because they have ten times the capacity of commercial graphite anodes and could drastically increase the driving distance of electric vehicles,” said Xin Li, Associate Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper.

In 2021, Li and his team offered one way to deal with dendrites by designing a multilayer battery that sandwiched different materials of varying stabilities between the anode and cathode.

This multilayer, multi-material design prevented the penetration of lithium dendrites not by stopping them altogether, but rather by controlling and containing them.

In the new research, Li and his team stop dendrites from forming by using micron-sized silicon particles in the anode to constrict the lithiation reaction and facilitate homogeneous plating of a thick layer of lithium metal.

These coated particles create a homogenous surface across which the current density is evenly distributed, preventing the growth of dendrites.

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