Alloy Design for Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes

A set of guidelines is proposed for designing high-energy-density alloy anode materials. It is first shown that the molar volume of lithium is about in a wide variety of lithium alloys and is independent of lithium content. Using this property of lithium alloys, simple relationships between the volumetric energy density and the volumetric expansion of an alloy are derived. These relationships are extremely powerful for designing alloys with the maximum possible energy density for a given electrode-coating performance.