Recent Progress in Designing Stable Composite Lithium Anodes with Improved Wettability

Lithium (Li) is a promising battery anode because of its high theoretical capacity and low reduction potential, but safety hazards that arise from its continuous dendrite growth and huge volume changes limit its practical applications. Li can be hosted in a framework material to address these key issues, but methods to encage Li inside scaffolds remain challenging. The melt infusion of molten Li into substrates has attracted enormous attention in both academia and industry because it provides an industrially adoptable technology capable of fabricating composite Li anodes. In this review, the wetting mechanism driving the spread of liquefied Li toward a substrate is discussed. Following this, various strategies are proposed to engineer stable Li metal composite anodes that are suitable for liquid and solid‐state electrolytes. A general conclusion and a perspective on the current limitations and possible future research directions for constructing composite Li anodes for high‐energy lithium metal batteries are presented. Infusing molten Li into framework structured substrates helps address the safety hazards of Li metal, but strategies to entrap Li metal inside the scaffolds presents a major challenge. This review focuses on the recent achievements in constructing stable Li metal composite anodes by the thermal infusion method with control of the wetting mechanism.