Architected Low-Tortuosity Electrodes with Tunable Porosity from Nonequilibrium Soft-Matter Processing

Mass transport is performance-defining across energy storage devices, often causing limitations at high current rates. To optimize and balance the device-scale energy and power density for a given energy storage demand, tailored electrode architectures with precisely controllable phase dimensions are needed in combination with low-tortuosity channels that maximize the geometric component of diffusion and species flux. A material-agnostic nonequilibrium soft-matter process is reported to fabricate free-standing inorganic composite electrodes with adjustable thicknesses of 100s of µm, featuring straight and accessible channels ranging in diameter from 5-30 µm, coupled with tunable material-to-pore ratios. Such architected anode and cathode electrodes exhibit electrochemical and architectural stability over extended cycling in a full-cell battery. Further, mass-transport constraints appear at high current densities, and the lithiation step is identified as rate-performance limiting, a result of insufficient lithium-ion supply and concentration polarization. The results demonstrate the need for and feasibility of tailored electrode architectures where dimensional ratios between low-tortuosity channels, the charge-storing matrix, and electrode thickness are tunable to meet coupled power and energy-storage requirements.