Advanced lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for applications in electric vehicles, energy storage, and high-power devices call for novel designs of the electrochemical materials and the cell architecture. Among the candidates are bipolar LIBs which have an advanced stack configuration, simplify the cell components, and hold the promise to revolute the integrated cell design in the future. [1][2][3] In typical bipolar LIBs, cathode and anode slurries consisting of active materials, conductive carbon, and binders are separately coated on two sides of a current collector so that n (≥2) units of such can be serially connected to assemble a high-voltage cell. The design minimizes the internal resistive loss between neighboring cells in a stack, offers uniform current and field distributions, and allows high-power cell operations. It also minimizes the usage of inactive cell components such as those for housing and connecting, thus increases the gravimetric and volumetric energy density and lowers the cost compared to conventional LIB design. [3] Therefore, bipolar LIBs are more competitive in many applications, e.g., in electric vehicles which require high-voltage battery packs with 300-500 V working voltages. [4,5] As the preferred current collector in bipolar LIBs is aluminum foil (which has a lithiation voltage of ≈0.3 V vs Li/ Li + ), low-redox-voltage anodes such as graphite, carbon-silicon composite, and lithium metal cannot be used, and the conventional choice is lithium titanate Li 4 Ti 5 O 12 with a relatively low capacity (theoretical capacity: 175 mAh g −1 ). [3,5] It is therefore the goal of the present study to develop a cheap high-capacity anode with a suitable redox potential and stable cycling performance for high-energy-density bipolar LIBs. We chose conversion-type iron oxide FeO x because of its non-toxicity, earth abundance, low processing cost, high crystal density (5.24 g cm −3 for Fe 2 O 3 and 5.18 g cm −3 for Fe 3 O 4 , compared to 2.16 g cm −3 for graphite, 2.33 g cm −3 for Si, and 0.534 g cm −3 for Li), proper redox potential (lower cutoff voltage: 0.5 V vs Li/Li + , average delithiation voltage: 1.5 V vs Li/Li + ), and high capacity (the theoretical capacity is 1007 mAh g −1 for Fe 2 O 3 and 926 mAh g −1 for Fe 3 O 4 ). [6][7][8][9] Despite of the high capacity, FeO x like other conversion-type TM oxides, has poor cycling stability
High-capacity metal oxides based on non-toxic earth-abundant elements offer unique opportunities as advanced anodes for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs).But they often suffer from large volumetric expansion, particle pulverization, extensive side reactions, and fast degradations during cycling. Here, an easy synthesis method is reported to construct amorphous borate coating network, which stabilizes conversion-type iron oxide anode for the highenergy-density semi-solid-state bipolar LIBs. The nano-borate coated iron oxide anode has high tap density (1.6 g cm −3 ), high capacity (710 mAh g −1 between 0.5 -3.0 V, vs Li/Li + ), good rate performance (200 mAh g −1 at 50 C), and...