3 years ago

Lithium Dendrite Growth Mechanisms in Liquid Electrolytes

A unified theoretical framework of dendrite growth kinetics has been developed to account for the coupled effects of electrodeposition, surface tension, and elastic and plastic deformation. The contribution of each driving force is assessed to identify five regimes of lithium growth: thermodynamic suppression regime, incubation regime, tip-controlled growth regime, base-controlled growth regime, and mixed growth regime, in agreement with the experimental scientific literature. Tip-controlled growth shows a linear time-dependence, while base-controlled growth shows an exponential time-dependence. A minimum in the growth rate, as a result of the reaction energy barrier increase imposed on the interface by the local elastic energy, is identified in the mixed growth regime. Further, two characteristic deposition times are identified: the characteristic deposition time, $t ○$, which defines the critical time scale necessary to overcome the electrochemical energy barrier for nucleation, and the characteristic plasticity time, $t σ$, which corresponds to the time scale necessary for plastic flow to occur, given a local shear stress. Examples of experimentally reported transitions between tip-controlled growth and base-controlled growth are readily captured through the proposed framework. While one or more mechanisms may dominate the growth of the electrodeposit, the proposed formulation defines a road map to design dendrite-free, lithium-based anodes as a stepping stone to identify alternate chemistries that are dendrite-free.

Highlights

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S2211285517305244

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.