Exploring Aluminum‐Antimony Intermetallic Chemistry for High‐Capacity Cheap and Scalable Battery

Rechargeable aluminum batteries have sparked immense interest as one of the future energy storage devices owing to safer chemistry, abundance of raw materials, and scalability at a much cheaper price than lithium‐ion batteries. However, the difficulty of inserting Al 3+ ions in the positive electrode is still the bottleneck in commercializing this battery technology. To avoid this failure due to intercalation, this work has come up with an alternative solution in which an intermetallic battery with Al as anode and Sb as cathode has been fabricated. During discharge, Al spontaneously forms AlSb intermetallic, delivering energy, and during charge, Al gets electroplated back. Ni‐foam has been used as the current collector, leveraging its 3D‐microporous structure to support Sb and significantly reduce capacity decay, without any modification in the current collector or in the separator. This Sb electrode deposited on microporous Ni‐foam showcased a stable electrochemical performance, delivering 81 mAh g − 1 at a current density of 100 mA g − 1 . Through theoretical simulation (density functional theory), the experimental finding has been further validated to establish the intermetallic chemistry. These compelling results lead the way for the development of an intermetallic chemistry battery for future‐generation Al‐based batteries.