On: Lithium morphology discovery could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries

[willprice89]

> "Now that we know the shape of lithium, the question is, Can we tune it so that it forms cubes, which can be packed in densely to increase both the safety and performance of batteries?"

Is the idea that they would stack the dodecahedrons into an approximate cube shape, or can they tweak the synthesis so that lithium cubes are deposited directly?

[rtkwe → willprice89]

The latter. Though you can pack rhombic dodecahedrons with 100% efficiency I doubt you could get them to grow that way at an industrial scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_dodecahedral_honeycomb

[lazide → rtkwe]

Depends on the economic value - we grow monocrystaline silicon at large scale now, for instance.

[rtkwe → lazide]

Silicon has an inherently cubic crystalline structure and is way less reactive compared to lithium both of which help a lot. Maybe we could figure out monocrystalline lithium but the structure is a lot less forgiving.