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With the rapid development of electronics, electric vehicles, and grid energy storage stations, higher requirements have been put forward for advanced secondary batteries. Liquid metal/alloy electrodes have been considered as a promising development direction to achieve excellent electrochemical performance in metal-ion batteries, due to their specific advantages including the excellent electrode kinetics and self-healing ability against microstructural electrode damage. For conventional liquid batteries, high temperatures are needed to keep electrode liquid and ensure the high conductivity of molten salt electrolytes, which also brings the corrosion and safety issues. Ga-based metal/alloys, which can be operated at or near room temperature, are potential candidates to circumvent the above problems. In this review, the properties and advantages of Ga-based metal/alloys are summarized. Then, Ga-based liquid metal/alloys as anodes in various metal-ion batteries are reviewed in terms of their self-healing ability, battery configurations, working mechanisms, and so on. Furthermore, some views on the future development of Ga-based electrodes in batteries are provided.


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Self-healing Ga-based liquid metal/alloy anodes for rechargeable batteries

Show Author's information Meijia Song1( )Zhonghua Zhang2( )
School of Energy and Power, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang 212000, China
Key Laboratory for Liquid-Solid Structural Evolution and Processing of Materials (Ministry of Education), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jingshi Road 17923, Jinan 250061, China

Abstract

With the rapid development of electronics, electric vehicles, and grid energy storage stations, higher requirements have been put forward for advanced secondary batteries. Liquid metal/alloy electrodes have been considered as a promising development direction to achieve excellent electrochemical performance in metal-ion batteries, due to their specific advantages including the excellent electrode kinetics and self-healing ability against microstructural electrode damage. For conventional liquid batteries, high temperatures are needed to keep electrode liquid and ensure the high conductivity of molten salt electrolytes, which also brings the corrosion and safety issues. Ga-based metal/alloys, which can be operated at or near room temperature, are potential candidates to circumvent the above problems. In this review, the properties and advantages of Ga-based metal/alloys are summarized. Then, Ga-based liquid metal/alloys as anodes in various metal-ion batteries are reviewed in terms of their self-healing ability, battery configurations, working mechanisms, and so on. Furthermore, some views on the future development of Ga-based electrodes in batteries are provided.

Keywords: room temperature, metal-ion batteries, Ga-based liquid metal/alloy anodes, self-healing capability

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Publication history
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Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 23 April 2023
Revised: 06 June 2023
Accepted: 23 June 2023
Published: 31 July 2023
Issue date: March 2024

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press 2023

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Key Research and Development Program of Shandong Province (No. 2021ZLGX01) and the support of Taishan Scholar Foundation of Shandong Province.

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