Advancing Next-Generation Energy Storage with Liquid Alkali Metals

The transition toward sustainable energy systems demands innovative battery technologies that go beyond conventional lithium-ion solutions. While lithium-ion batteries dominate today’s market, their limitations-including resource scarcity, cost, and environmental impact-highlight the need for alternative chemistries. Alkali metals such as sodium and potassium, along with their alloys, offer a promising path forward due to their natural abundance, low cost, and strong electrochemical potential.

Replacing traditional intercalation-based anodes with alkali-metal electrodes can significantly boost battery performance, increasing energy density by up to 50%. However, implementing solid alkali-metal electrodes presents major challenges, including dendrite formation, unstable interfaces, and poor contact with solid electrolytes. Solid-state electrolytes improve stability, but often require high mechanical pressure to maintain sufficient contact, limiting practical application.

Liquid alkali-metal electrodes-particularly sodium-potassium (Na-K) alloys-provide a compelling alternative. Their liquid nature suppresses dendrite formation and enables self-adaptive interfaces with solid electrolytes, improving safety and performance without requiring extreme pressure. Notably, Na-K alloys remain liquid at or near room temperature, offering unique advantages for low-temperature, high-performance battery systems.

A key factor governing the effectiveness of liquid metal electrodes is their wetting behavior-how well the liquid metal spreads across and interacts with solid materials. Wetting directly impacts interfacial contact, ion transport, and long-term stability. Despite its importance, the fundamental understanding of wetting and surface tension in Na-K systems has remained limited.

Our work addresses this gap by systematically investigating the surface tension and wetting behavior of sodium, potassium, and Na-K alloys using advanced measurement techniques. By applying the Du Noüy ring method and thermodynamic modeling, we provide highly accurate, reproducible data across a wide range of compositions and temperatures. These insights reveal critical relationships between temperature, composition, and interfacial properties, enabling more precise control of liquid metal behavior in battery environments.

In parallel, we explore strategies to enhance alkali-metal management using engineered porous carbon materials. Through targeted heat treatments, we significantly improve the wettability of carbon hosts by liquid metals, enabling stable, high-capacity electrode architectures without complex manufacturing or extreme operating conditions.

Together, these advances lay the foundation for the rational design of next-generation batteries based on liquid alkali-metal electrodes. By improving interfacial stability, scalability, and performance, this research contributes to the development of safer, more sustainable, and higher-energy storage systems for a wide range of future applications.

Please also refer to the publications section for our recent works in this research area.