A team at Harvard has a developed a design for a solid-state battery that uses a hierarchy of interface stabilities (to lithium metal responses), to achieve an ultrahigh current density with no lithium dendrite penetration. Cycling performance of the Li-metal anode paired with a LiNi 0.8 Mn 0.1 Co 0.1 O 2 cathode is very stable, with an 82% capacity retention after 10,000 cycles at a 20C rate, and 81.3% capacity retention after 2,000 cycles at a 1.5C rate. The design also enables a specific power of 110.6 kW/kg and specific energy up to 631.1 Wh/kg at the micrometer-sized cathode material level. A paper on the work is published in the journal Nature . A major challenge with Li-metal batteries (in which the anode is made of lithium metal) is dendrite formation on the surface of the anode. These needle-like structures grow into the electrolyte and pierce the separator, […]