Lightweight 3D Porous Al Foams for the Hosts of High-Performance Li Metal Anodes

Lightweight, 3D porous, and lithiophilic Al foams has been used as the hosts for Li metal anodes, and compounded with metallic Li by a facile mechanical extrusion method to obtain the Al@Li composite anodes. The high lithiophilicity of Al foams could provide abundant and uniform active sites for Li nucleation, thus inducing the fast nucleation and uniform electro-deposition of Li metal into the Al foams. Moreover, the 3D porous structures of Al foams could accommodate the huge volume change of Li metal anodes during the charge/discharge process and reduce the local current density, thus effectively inhibiting the growth of Li dendrites. Therefore, compared with the bare Li metal anodes, the obtained Al@Li composite anodes exhibited higher cycling stability of Li plating/stripping with a lower overpotential of ca. 5 mV at 1 mA.cm(-2) after 250 cycles in their symmetric cells. Furthermore, half-cell configurations with the Al@Li composite anodes and LiFePO4 cathodes also presented significantly enhanced cycling capacity and rate performance.