Prospect of Thermal Shock Induced Healing of Lithium Dendrite

Dendritic growth plagues the development
of rechargeable lithium
metal anodes. Recently, it has been reported that (Science 2018, 359, 1513−1516) self-heating
of the cell provides a mitigation strategy for suppressing dendrites.
In order to study this phenomenon, we extend our recently developed
nonlinear phase-field model to incorporate an energy balance equation
allowing a full thermally coupled electrodeposition model using the
open-source software package MOOSE. In this work, we consider the
interplay between ionic transport and electrochemical reaction rate
as a function of temperature and explore the possibility of using
thermal shock induced dendrite suppression. We discover that, depending
on the electrochemical reaction barrier and ionic diffusion barrier,
self-heating could accelerate (larger reaction barrier) or decelerate
(larger diffusion barrier) dendrite formation. Given that the electrolyte
constituents can be used to tune both barriers, this study could provide
an important avenue to exploit the self-heating effect favorably through
electrolyte engineering.