Driven by the global push for carbon neutrality, demand for high-energy-density lithium-ion batteries has surged across electric mobility, grid storage and consumer electronics. Silicon-based anodes, with a theoretical specific capacity nearly ten times that of conventional graphite, represent the most promising pathway to break the energy density ceiling of commercial battery systems. Yet massive irreversible lithium consumption during solid electrolyte interphase formation in the first cycle typically erodes 20%–40% of full-cell usable capacity, presenting a major barrier to large-scale adoption of high-silicon batteries.
Prelithiation, which introduces an external lithium reservoir to offset these first-cycle losses, is widely recognized as the most effective strategy to overcome this bottleneck. Over decades of development, three generations of prelithiation technologies have emerged, each delivering impressive performance gains in laboratory settings. Yet a persistent disconnect remains between academic research and industrial manufacturing: the field lacks a unified, verifiable evaluation framework with standardized scoring thresholds, making objective cross-strategy comparisons and informed industrial technology selection extremely challenging.
Now, in a comprehensive, practice-oriented review published in Science Bulletin , a research team from Tiangong University addresses this critical gap. The team systematically deconstructs the working principles, electrochemical performance profiles and intrinsic failure modes of eight representative prelithiation strategies across three categories, i.e., electrochemical, chemical and sacrificial salt-based. They further establish a semi-quantitative industrial evaluation framework covering eight core dimensions, enabling rigorous head-to-head cross-strategy comparisons grounded in publicly available experimental data and mainstream battery-industry engineering consensus.
The eight evaluation dimensions span the full manufacturing value chain: air stability, process compatibility, process safety, by-product management, relative cost, prelithiation precision, environmental friendliness and prelithiation capacity. Each dimension is assigned explicitly defined, independently verifiable three-level scoring thresholds anchored to real-world industrial constraints, minimizing subjective bias and providing a common benchmark for the entire field.
When applied to the eight strategies, the framework reveals distinct performance clusters with clear industrial implications. Sacrificial salt-based approaches, especially cathode-integrated variants, form a clear industrial advantage cluster, with no dimension scoring below the acceptable level. Their excellent ambient stability eliminates the need for specialized inert-atmosphere equipment; their full compatibility with existing production lines avoids costly retrofitting; and their benign gaseous by-products are fully removable via standard cell degassing. These properties position them as the leading candidate for gigawatt‑scale battery manufacturing. In contrast, electrochemical prelithiation achieves unparalleled lithiation precision and capacity, but faces fundamental barriers to high-throughput roll-to-roll production, and remains the gold standard for fundamental laboratory research. Chemical prelithiation delivers the highest lithium utilization efficiency and lowest inactive mass penalty, but is hindered by substantial safety hazards and poor batch-to-batch consistency, limiting its use to small-batch, high-value applications.
Crucially, the team emphasizes that no single prelithiation strategy is universally optimal across all use cases. To guide scenario-specific selection, they constructed an application-focused decision matrix covering five representative use cases, i.e., electric vehicles, consumer electronics, grid-scale energy storage, military and aerospace, and flexible and wearable electronics, each with weighted evaluation criteria aligned to its core priorities. For electric vehicles demanding high throughput, low cost and robust production safety, cathode-integrated sacrificial salt prelithiation is the recommended route. For consumer electronics prioritizing maximum energy density, direct-contact prelithiation with stabilized lithium metal powder offers the best performance-to-cost balance. For grid-scale energy storage targeting ultra-long service life, electrolyte-based prelithiation enables repeated in-situ lithium replenishment over decades of operation. For high-reliability military and aerospace applications, separator-integrated prelithiation physically isolates the lithium source from active electrodes to maximize long-term storage stability. For flexible and wearable electronics, where user safety and mechanical robustness are paramount, anode-integrated sacrificial salts deliver the best overall performance.
Building on the systematic cross-strategy comparison, the authors distilled five universal design rules that next-generation prelithiation reagents and processes must satisfy: precise matching of decomposition potentials to the electrolyte stability window, high gravimetric lithium release capacity with tunable dosing precision, chemically inert and fully removable decomposition by-products, intrinsic safety and environmental compatibility across the full life cycle, and full compatibility with standard battery manufacturing workflows. These rules provide clear, quantitative guidance for molecular materials design and process engineering optimization.
“For years, the prelithiation field has been held back by inconsistent evaluation standards and a lack of actionable industrial guidance,” said Prof. Zhiqiang Shi and Dr. Congkai Sun, corresponding authors of the study. “Our framework gives researchers and manufacturers a common language to align innovation with real-world manufacturing needs. We hope this work will accelerate the translation of high-performance prelithiation technologies from the lab into commercial battery products.”
Science Bulletin
Systematic review