Recently, the team of Academician Ce-Wen Nan and Professor Yang Shen at Tsinghua University published a research paper titled "Suppressing Sodium Dendrites Through Protein-Mediated Tip Adsorption Effect" in Advanced Materials (Wiley), with DOI 10.1002/adma.74672; Yue Li is the first author and Shen Yang the corresponding author. The paper is also listed on Professor Shen Yang's faculty homepage (School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University) under his 2026 publications. The research background: sodium ions have a larger radius and more complex interfacial reactions; during deposition/stripping, sodium metal anodes are prone to uneven ion flux, unstable SEI and dendrite growth, causing capacity decay and short-circuit risks, while conventional electrolyte additives usually address only a single problem.
The core idea is the "protein-mediated tip adsorption effect": using renewable, biodegradable biomass proteins such as bovine serum albumin (BSA) as electrolyte additives, leveraging their "amino acid-peptide-protein" hierarchical structure to preferentially adsorb at high-energy active dendrite tips, homogenize surface current and sodium-ion flux, and induce smoother sodium deposition; meanwhile promoting rearrangement of the sodium metal anode toward the more stable (110) facet, and participating in building a thin, dense, inorganic-rich SEI/CEI interphase. Reported experimental data include: sodium symmetric cells show markedly enhanced cycling and stripping performance at 1, 5 and 10 mA/cm2, with a maximum tolerable current density exceeding 25 mA/cm2; NVP||Na cells achieve 20,000 cycles at 10C and 16,000 cycles at an ultrahigh 50C rate; NVP||Al@C cells with a high cathode loading of 10.32 mg/cm2 sustain 1,000 stable cycles at 5C.
: this is a laboratory academic result - the NVP (sodium vanadium phosphate) system and cycle data are laboratory coin-cell figures, one generation apart from commercial cells, and cannot be used to judge commercialization progress; the cycle-life data come from specific test conditions, and scale-up and field validation will take time; the cost and scale-up feasibility of BSA additives have not been disclosed.