Pretreatment of Lithium Surface by Using Iodic Acid (HIO3) To Improve Its Anode Performance in Lithium Batteries

Iodic acid (HIO3) was exploited as the effective source to build an artificial solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) on the surface of Li anode. On one hand, HIO3 is a weak solid-state acid and can be easily handled to remove most ion-insulating residues like Li2CO3 and/or LiOH from the pristine Li surface; on the other hand, both the products of LiI and LiIO3 resulted from the chemical reactions between Li metal and HIO3 are reported to be the ion-conductive components. As a result, the lower voltage polarization and impedance, longer cycling lifetime and higher Coulombic efficiency have been successfully achieved in the HIO3-treated Li–Li and Li–Cu cells. By further using the HIO3-treated Li anode into practical Li–S batteries, the impressive results also have been obtained, with average discharge capacities of 719 mAh g–1 for 200 cycles (0.2 C) and 506 mAh g–1 for 500 cycles (0.5 C), which were better than the Li–S batteries using the pristine Li anode (552 and 401 mAh g–1, respectively) under the same conditions.