A study of the properties of the surface layers formed on lithium electrodes in sulfolane-based electrolytes (extended abstract)

The relevance of the use of lithium in high energy secondary batteries is mainly determined by the properties of the layers which are inevitably formed on the electrode surfaces. The surface layers can be responsible for the limitation of the cycle life of a battery either by giving rise to inhibitory polarization voltages provoked by the passivating properties of the layers, or by excluding some metallic lithium from the cycling processes (insufficiency of protection against corrosion, and/or generation of heterogeneous processes). In this paper we report experimental approaches used to determine the relative importance of these two limiting aspects.