Liquid Metals for Energy Storage Devices: Progress and Challenges

Room-temperature liquid metals (LMs) have emerged as distinctive functional materials for electrochemical energy storage, owing to their metallic conductivity, fluidic deformability, self-healing capability, and adaptive electrochemical behavior. Local electric-field regulation, enhanced ion transport, volume-change accommodation, and dendrite suppression are enabled by these intrinsic properties, thereby offering opportunities to overcome interfacial instability and limited cycling durability in conventional systems. In this review, recent advances in LM-enabled energy storage are summarized from the perspectives of physicochemical properties, micro-/macroscopic structural regulations, and performance-oriented applications. To clarify their roles in electrochemical stabilization, the fundamental properties, alloy design, surface modification, and composite construction of LMs are discussed, while emerging structural engineering strategies, including porous structures, patterning, and 3D printing, are briefly introduced to tailor LM architectures and functionalities. Particular emphasis is placed on multiphysics coupling modeling, density functional theory (DFT), and molecular dynamics simulations, which provide mechanistic insights into the evolution of the electric field, ion migration, interfacial reaction, alloying behavior, stress redistribution, and dendrite suppression. Representative applications in electrodes, electrolytes, and interfacial engineering are surveyed. Finally, challenges and potential solutions in chemical stability, structural controllability, interfacial compatibility, and scalable device integration are discussed.