Better Texture for Better Batteries

A new battery innovation looks at an overlooked attribute — the texture of metal —to improve performance.

June 1, 2025

The University of Chicago, IL

A new paper from the lab of UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Professor Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion and industry partner Thermo Fisher Scientific demonstrated how improving the texture of metal used in batteries greatly enhanced performance. (Image: UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering/John Zich)

To create the new batteries needed for EVs, mobile devices, and renewable energy storage, researchers have explored new materials, new designs, new configurations, and new chemistry. But one aspect — the texture of the metals used — has been historically overlooked.

“Soft metals like lithium and sodium have excellent properties for being batteries’ negative electrodes, with lithium considered as an ultimate anode material for future high-energy rechargeable batteries,” said UChicago PME Professor Shirley Meng, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering. “There is a gap in understanding how the grain orientation, also known as the texture, impacts rechargeable metal battery performance.”

A new paper from Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion and industry partner Thermo Fisher Scientific broke through that barrier, demonstrating that improving the metal’s texture greatly improved performance. The work was published in the journal Joule.

“In our work, we discovered that adding a thin layer of silicon between the lithium metal and the current collector helps create the desired texture,” said UChicago PME Research Associate Professor Minghao Zhang, the first author of the new work. “This change improved the battery’s rate capability by nearly ten times in all-solid-state batteries using lithium metal.”

The ideal texture for a battery anode is one where atoms can quickly move along the surface plane. This fast movement helps the battery charge and discharge faster. “Since batteries with lithium or sodium metal rely on the textures for favored rate capability, the team wondered if tweaking the texture of soft metals could improve power densities,” Zhang said.

Researching this, required getting past a hurdle in microscopy. To study the material, the group coupled milling within a plasma focused ion beam-scanning electron microscope (PFIB-SEM) with electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) mapping. Together, the two techniques enabled studying the texture in new ways.

“Collecting texture information on soft metals is challenging, primarily due to difficulties in accessing the area of interest and the lithium and sodium metal’s reactivity,” said study co-author Zhao Liu, Senior Market Development Manager of Thermo Fisher Scientific, which is a founding member of the UChicago Energy Transition Network. “The PFIB-EBSD combination is well-suited for this study, as PFIB can effectively access the area of interest within the cell stack, producing a high-quality surface with minimal defects, while EBSD provides detailed texture information on the soft metal.”

The researchers’ next challenge is to lower the pressure used during testing from five megapascals (MPa) to one MPa, the current industry standard for commercially available batteries. They also plan to study the impact of texture on sodium, which Meng has long studied as an inexpensive, readily available alternative to lithium.

“Because we now understand how the texture forms in soft metals, we predict that sodium metal will prefer to have texture for fast atomic diffusion,” Zhang said. “This means that using sodium as the battery’s anode in all-solid-state batteries could lead to a big breakthrough in future energy storage.”

For more information, contact Paul Dalling at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..