Guiding confined deposition of lithium through the conductivity changing interface within a hierarchical heterostructure toward dendrite-free lithium anodes

Although lithium metal has long been regarded as a promising anode material for high-energy density batteries due to its high specific capacity and low potential, the safety hazard caused by uncontrollable growth of lithium dendrites limited its practical applications. Herein, we developed a hierarchical heterostructure consisted of the carbon fiber cloth (CFC) core with good conductivity and the treated metal-organic frameworks (tMOFs) sheath with poor conductivity (CFC-tMOFs). In this structure, not only the conductivity changing interface trapped lithium inside the porous sheath, guiding uniform lithium nucleation, but also the tMOFs sheath served as a persistent buffer layer to confine subsequent deposition of lithium, avoiding the formation of lithium dendrites. Consequently, lithium dendrites were efficiently eliminated with a uniform lithium deposition of 5 mAh cm⁻², and this matrix exhibited superior cycling stability with a high coulombic efficiency of 99% over 500 cycles with 1 mAh cm⁻².