Designing a Quasi-Liquid Alloy Interface for Solid Na-Ion Battery

Solid-state sodium-ion batteries are attracting great attention due to their high energy density and high safety. However, the Na dendrite growth and poor wettability between sodium and electrolytes seriously limit its application. Herein, we designed a stable and dendrite-suppressed quasi-liquid alloy interface (C@Na–K) for solid sodium-ion batteries (SSIBs). The batteries exhibit excellent electrochemical performance thanks to better wettability and accelerated charge transfer and nucleation mode shifts. The thickness of the liquid phase alloy interface fluctuates along with the exotherm of the cell cycling process, which leads to better rate performance. The symmetrical cell can cycle steadily over 3500 h at 0.1 mA/cm2 at room temperature, and the critical current density can reach 2.6 mA/cm2 at 40 °C. The full cells with the quasi-liquid alloy interface also show outstanding performance; the capacity retention can reach 97.1%, and the average Coulombic efficiency can reach 99.6% of the battery at 0.5 C even after 300 cycles. These results proved the feasibility of using a liquid alloy interface of the anode for high-energy SSIBs, and this innovative approach to stabilizing the interface performance could serve as a basis for the development of next-generation high-energy SSIBs.