Are Foils the Future of Anodes?

[Formula presented]Steven T. Boles currently holds the position of associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He obtained his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in materials science and engineering. In 2010 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to conduct in situ and operando research on lithium-ion battery anodes at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since 2014, he has been leading an interdisciplinary research team at PolyU that explores new materials for electrochemical energy storage devices, energy infrastructure, and high-efficiency electronic devices. [Formula presented]Mohammad H. Tahmasebi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University. He obtained his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in materials engineering from Isfahan University of Technology. During his Ph.D., he joined the Polytechnic University of Milan to conduct his Ph.D. research project on electrode materials for pseudocapacitors. After graduation in 2016, he joined Dr. Steven Boles's group as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he was working on aluminum-based anode materials for lithium-ion batteries. He also worked as a visiting postdoctoral fellow (DAAD fellowship) in the Institute for Applied Materials at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Despite the excitement about new anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, a conventional composite design may be fundamentally incapable of realizing significant gains to capacity that are essential for the next generation of cells. In this commentary, renewed attention is brought to alloy anode foils, which serve as monolithic electrode materials by acting as the current collector and binder and by facilitating lithium storage. Although some of these candidates, like aluminum, have been previously investigated, geometric and thermodynamic considerations presented here warrant reconsideration.