Controllable lithium nucleation within longitudinally bent carbon nanoribbons for stable lithium metal anodes

Abstract

Though lithium metal has long been regarded as an ideal anode material for high-density batteries, the potential safety hazards greatly hampered its applications due to the non-uniform lithium nucleation and subsequent uncontrollable growth of lithium dendrites. To address these problems, herein, we developed carbon nanoribbons (LBCRs) with linearly distributed nucleation seeds and longitudinally bent structure. In the unique LBCRs, not only nucleation seeds located along edges decreased the nucleation barrier of lithium, inducing selective lithium nucleation, but also conductive carbon skeleton with bent structure regulated Li ion flux, preventing the formation of lithium dendrites. Moreover, LBCRs alleviated the volume change during cycling by guiding the lithium deposition inside the cavity. On the consequence, controllable lithium deposition was realized within LBCRs, and resulted composite anodes exhibited superior cycling stability including a low voltage hysteresis of 47.4 mV with a long cycle life over 700 h and a stable Coulombic efficiency above 94%.