Aluminum: An underappreciated anode material for lithium-ion batteries

Aluminum has excellent intrinsic properties as an anode material for lithium ion batteries, while this application is significantly underappreciated. Due to the high chemical reactivity of Al, bottom-up preparation of Al nanostructures is very challenging and Al based anode with high capacity and good stability is extremely challenging. In this work, we developed a plasma method to address the synthetic challenge. Using AlCl3-H2-CH4 plasma with the addition of low amount of FeCl3, a homogeneous Al-Fe/C nanocomposite with uniform particle size around 40 nm is obtained at near room temperature. The low pressure glow discharge plasma generates highly reactive intermediates such as AlCl and H radicals, which allows direct reduction of AlCl3 to metal Al in mild conditions. The plasma enabled reaction leads to performance breakthrough of the Al based anode materials, which suggests that Al should be more seriously considered as a promising candidate anode material for LIBs.