An empirical model for high energy density lithium-(ion) batteries with ultra-thick electrodes

Increasing the electrode thickness is a significant method to decrease the weight and volume ratio of the inactive components for high energy density of the devices. In this contribution, we extracted a repeating unit in the configurations and establish the empirical energy density model based on some assumptions. In this model, the effects of the electrode thickness on the energy density for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), lithium metal batteries (LMBs), and anode-free lithium batteries (ALBs) are evaluated quantitively with the current parameters of the batteries. The results demonstrate that the structure evolutions from LIBs, LMBs to ALBs with the reduction of the anode weight contribution, the energy density can be well improved exactly. While the increase of the thickness of the electrode provide another route to further enhance the energy density by decreasing the weight contribution of inactive materials; meanwhile the effects for ALBs are higher than LMBs and LIBs due to the higher weight ratio of inactive materials. This empirical energy density model is also applied into the practical system and provide intuitional results to guide the battery design for higher energy density.