Surface Science and Engineering for Electrochemical Materials

Abstract

In electrochemical energy storage systems, the reversible storage capacity of battery materials often degrades due to parasitic reactions at the electrode–electrolyte interface, transitional metal dissolution, and metallic dendrite growth at the surface. Surface engineering techniques offer the opportunity to modify the composition and structure of a surface, thereby enabling control over chemical reactions occurring at the surface and manipulating chemical interactions at the solid–solid or solid–liquid interface. These modifications can help stabilize the surface of electrode materials and prevent unwanted reactions with electrolytes without changing the original properties of the bulk structure. This allows for achieving full theoretical capacity and maximizing battery material capacity retention with minimal overpotentials. In the past decade, our teams have been working on developing a variety of surface engineering techniques. These include applying atomic and molecular layer deposition (ALD and MLD), templating, doping, and coating via wet-chemical processes to stabilize the surfaces of electrode materials. The aim is to mitigate parasitic side-reactions without impeding charge transfer kinetics, suppress dendrite growth, and ultimately improve the electrode performance.