Symposium F.EN03-Overcoming the Challenges with Metal Anodes for High-Energy Batteries

Metal electrodes are often described as the ideal anode for each of their respective battery chemistries. They typically have the most negative standard reduction potentials and the highest charge storage capacity. These properties are critical to enabling higher energy density in next generation batteries including metal-sulfur and metal-air batteries. Despite some initial promise, significant challenges have prevented the realization of their full potential and wide scale infiltration into the market. The focus of this symposium is to gather together researchers working on understanding and solving challenges with metal anodes. This symposium is specifically designed to include studies on metal anodes from a variety of different chemistries and operating in both liquid, solid-state, and hybrid electrolyte systems. Although some challenges are specific to the chemistry used, many challenges are directly analogous between metal anodes. We expect that strategies to overcome these challenges in one chemistry will often have analogous solutions in other chemistries. By integrating research from the fundamentals to the applied, and across battery chemistries we hope to facilitate accelerated development of batteries that can realize the potential for high energy and low cost that metal anodes can enable.

For clarification, the focus of this symposium is on metal anodes that rely on the plating and stripping of the mobile ionic species to store energy. Although using alloying metals such as Sn, In and Au as a seed layer to improve the performance of the primary metal anode is of interest, research focused on the alloying reaction as the primary mechanism for energy storage is not a focus of this research symposium. Submissions that focus on fundamental understandings of the challenges that metal anodes face in solid-state batteries are encouraged to submit to this symposium. Work that primarily focuses on solid state electrolytes, including novel materials, processing, and solid state cathodes should submit to EN07. Submissions that focus on beyond Li ion batteries such as Na, K, Mg, Ca, Li-S, Li-Air, that are not focused on understanding and solving the challenges specifically associated with the metal anode should submit to EN04. Studies focused primarily on safety should submit to EN06.

Topics will include:

Metal anodes for Li, Na, K, Mg, Ca, Al, Fe, and, Zn ion batteries
In-situ/operando techniques to evaluate morphological evolution of metal anodes
Modeling of dendritic growth and electrode evolution on cycling
Theoretical and experimental studies on interfacial stability between metal anodes and electrolytes
Mechanical properties of alkali metals across length scales relevant for batteries
Processing of Li thin films and other metals for batteries

Invited Speakers:

Hajime Arai (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Perla Balbuena (Texas A&M, USA)
Xi Chen (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
Neil Dasgupta (University of Michigan, USA)
Nancy Dudney (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
Julia Greer (California Institute of Technology, USA)
Erik Herbert (Michigan Technological University, USA)
Yasushi Katayama (Keio University, Japan)
Weiyang Li (Dartmouth College, USA)
Corey Love (Naval Research Laboratory, USA)
Lauren Marabella (Columbia University, USA)
Jacqueline Maslyn (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
Masaki Matsui (Kobe University, Japan)
Matthew McDowell (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Partha Mukherjee (Purdue University, USA)
Linda Nazar (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Cary Pint (Vanderbilt University, USA)
Debra Rolison (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, USA)
Hikari Sakaebe (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan)
Jennifer Schaefer (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Fu Sun (Qingdao Institute Of Bioenergy & Bioprocess Technology, China)
Tetsuya Tsuda (Osaka University, Japan)
Hui Wu (Tsinghua University, China)