Self-healing Ga-based liquid metal/alloy anodes for rechargeable batteries

With the rapid development of electronics, electric vehicles, and grid energy storage stations, higher requirements have been put forward for advanced secondary batteries. Liquid metal/alloy electrodes have been considered as a promising development direction to achieve excellent electrochemical performance in metal-ion batteries, due to their specific advantages including the excellent electrode kinetics and self-healing ability against microstructural electrode damage. For conventional liquid batteries, high temperatures are needed to keep electrode liquid and ensure the high conductivity of molten salt electrolytes, which also brings the corrosion and safety issues. Ga-based metal/alloys, which can be operated at or near room temperature, are potential candidates to circumvent the above problems. In this review, the properties and advantages of Ga-based metal/alloys are summarized. Then, Ga-based liquid metal/alloys as anodes in various metal-ion batteries are reviewed in terms of their self-healing ability, battery configurations, working mechanisms, and so on. Furthermore, some views on the future development of Ga-based electrodes in batteries are provided.