Stability of Solid Electrolyte Interphase Components on Lithium Metal and Reactive Anode Material Surfaces

By K. Leung, F. Soto, K. Hankins, P. Balbuena, K. Harrison. 2016

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Lithium ion batteries (LIB) can feature reactive anodes that operate at low potentials, such as lithium metal or silicon, passivated by solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) films. SEI is known to evolve over time as cycling proceeds. In this modeling work, we focus on the stability of two main SEI components, lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and lithium ethylene dicarbonate (LEDC). Both components are electrochemically stable but thermodynamically unstable near the equilibrium Li+/Li(s) potential. Interfacial reactions represent one way to trigger the intrinsic thermodynamic instability. Both Li2CO3 and LEDC are predicted to exhibit exothermic reactions on lithium metal surfaces, and the barriers are sufficiently low to permit reactions on battery operation time scales. LEDC also readily decomposes on high Li-content LixSi surfaces. Our studies suggest that the innermost SEI layer on lithium metal surfaces should be a thin layer of Li2O, the only thermodynamically and kinetically stable component (in the absence ...

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13169bd9c705afaf6923e96aa29b42457dbf8c1d

Citations in the corpus

• In Situ Chemical Imaging of Solid-Electrolyte Interphase Layer Evolution in Li–S Batteries (2017, unknown): “During the cycling process, we observed that the polysulfide reduces to insoluble Li 2 S, which can grow as a passivating film on the Li-anode surface.”
• Alkali Metal Anodes for Rechargeable Batteries (2019, unknown): “Through theoretical calculation, Leung’s group believed that these two components were electrochemically stable but thermodynamically unstable.(18) With the reaction barriers lower than 0.”