Bio‐Inspired Damage‐Tolerant Si‐Based Anode for Lithium‐Ion Batteries

ABSTRACT

Silicon is a promising anode material for lithium‐ion batteries due to its high specific capacity, but it suffers from large volume change and rapid brittle fracture during the lithiation/delithiation cycling process. Although the majority of the literature work has tried to avoid fracture by restraining volume expansion or relieving expansion stress, in this work, we designed and fabricated a damage‐tolerant multilayered anode inspired by the structure of nacre that can turn an intrinsically brittle mineral into a tough one. By sandwiching the brittle silicon layers between lithium titanate layers, this multilayered anode achieves outstanding cyclic performance with only a slight reduction in specific capacity (the specific capacity remains at 1800 mAh g ⁻¹ after 200 cycles). More importantly, this multilayered anode does not lose performance even when the silicon layer breaks, demonstrating a damage tolerance property. This work offers a new and promising philosophy for developing high‐performance silicon‐based anodes for rechargeable lithium‐ion batteries.