Latest ArticlesSolid-state batteries (SSBs) with thermal stable solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) show intrinsic capacity and great potential in energy density improvement. SSEs play critical role, however, their low ionic conductivity at room temperature and high brittleness hinder their further development. In this paper, polypropylene (PP)-polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)-Li1.3Al0.3Ti1.7(PO4)3 (LATP)-Lithium bis(trifluoromethane sulphonyl)imide (LiTFSI) multi-layered composite solid electrolyte (CSE) is prepared by a simple separator coating strategy. The incorporation of LATP nanoparticle fillers and high concentration LiTFSI not only reduces the crystallinity of PVDF, but also forms a solvation structure, which contributes to high ionic conductivity in a wide temperature. In addition, using a PP separator as the supporting film, the mechanical strength of the electrolyte was improved and the growth of lithium dendrites are effectively inhibited. The results show that the CSE prepared in this paper has a high ionic conductivity of 6.38×10–4 S/cm at room temperature and significantly improves the mechanical properties, the tensile strength reaches 11.02 MPa. The cycle time of Li/Li symmetric cell assembled by CSE at room temperature can exceed 800 h. The Li/LFP full cell can cycle over 800 cycles and the specific capacity of Li/LFP full cell can still reach 120 mAh/g after 800 cycles at 2 C. This CSE has good cycle stability and excellent mechanical strength at room temperature, which provides an effective method to improve the performance of solid electrolytes under moderate condition.
Flexible zinc-ion batteries (FZIBs) have been acknowledged as a potential cornerstone for the future development of flexible energy storage, yet conventional FZIBs still encounter challenges, particularly concerning performance failure at low temperatures. To address these challenges, a novel anti-freezing leather gel electrolyte (AFLGE-30) is designed, incorporating ethanol as a hydrogen bonding acceptor. The AFLGE-30 demonstrates exceptional frost resistance while maintaining favorable flexibility even at −30 ℃; accordingly, the battery can achieve a high specific capacity of about 70 mAh/g. Cu//Zn battery exhibits remarkable stability at room temperature, retaining ~96% efficiency after 120 plating/stripping cycles at 1 mA/cm2. Concurrently, the Zn//Zn symmetric batteries demonstrate a lifespan of 4100 h at room temperature, which is attributed to the enhancement of Zn2+ deposition kinetics, restraining the formation of zinc dendrites. Furthermore, FZIBs exhibit minimal capacity loss even after bending, impacting, or burning. This work provides a promising strategy for designing low-temperature-resistant FZIBs.
The ultra-high nickel cathode material has important application prospect in power lithium-ion batteries. However, the poor structural stability and serious surface/interfacial side reactions during long cycles severely hinder the material's practical application. In this paper, Cs+ doping and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) coating are used to synergistically modify the NCM955 material. The results show that the corresponding discharge specific capacity of NCMCs-2@P-2 material reaches 152.02 mAh/g at 1 C (1 C = 200 mA/g) and 125.66 mAh/g at 5 C after 300 cycles, and the capacity retention is 78.11% and 72.21%, respectively. In addition, it still maintains 156.36 mAh/g discharge specific capacity at 10 C, and these rate and cycle properties exceed those reported on ultra-high nickel cathode material. Moreover, NCMCs-2@P-2 material has higher migration energy barrier of Ni2+ and lower migration energy barrier of Li+ than that of NCM955 material. Therefore, NCMCs-2@P-2 material has excellent electrochemical properties, which has been proved by a series of structural characterization, theoretical calculation and performance test. The synergistic enhancement of Cs+ doping and PMMA coating accelerates lithium ion diffusion kinetics, stabilizes crystal structure, and inhabits surface/interface side reaction.
Sodium metal batteries (SMBs) have drawn much attention as complement to lithium metal batteries for next generation high-energy batteries. However, it is still a big challenge to enhance their cycling stability without sufficient sodium reserve in anode, due to the non-uniform Na plating/stripping and uncontrolled Na dendrite growth. Herein, a dual layer host consists of sodiophilic graphene@antimony nanoparticles bottom layer and 3D polyacrylonitrile nanofiber top layer (PAN-G@Sb) is employed to enable highly reversible Na plating/stripping. Thanks to the uniform Na deposition, PAN-G@Sb delivers an outstanding average Coulombic efficiency of 99.8%, highly reversible Na plating/stripping for 1000 cycles at 2.0 mA/cm2, as well as over 1000 h of stable operation in symmetric cells. When paired with a high mass loading Na3V2(PO4)3 (NVP) cathode (16.2 mg/cm2), the full cell (N/P ratio = 1.4) also displays prominent capacity retention of 98.7% after 250 cycles with a high energy density of 284.6 Wh/kg. Moreover, PAN-G@SbNVP anode-free full cell also shows an excellent capacity retention of 91.0% after 50 cycles at 0.5 C, exhibiting the stable operation of high energy SMBs.
High-capacity Ni-rich layered cathodes LiNixCoyMn1−x−yO2 (NCM) have been widely recognized as highly promising candidates for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, NCM cathodes are suffered from sluggish Li-ion kinetics and fast capacity decay. Herein, the Nb/Ti co-doping strategy has been proposed by formation energy analysis to enhance the mechanical and chemical integrities of NCM cathode. Nb/Ti co-doping facilitates Li-ion transport of NCM cathode for boosting the rate ability. Furthermore, the structure stability is prominently improved for the stronger Nb–O and Ti–O bonds, resulting from the suppressed sharp contraction of c axis, inhibited microcracks formation, and alleviated electrolyte corrosion. Inspired by the synergistic effect of Nb/Ti co-doping, the modified NCM exhibits superior comprehensive electrochemical performances. The Nb/Ti co-doping NCM exhibits an increased discharge capacity of 144.3 mAh/g at 10 C and an outstanding capacity retention remained 92.7% after 300 cycles at 1 C. This work offers a promising approach to developing high-performance cathode materials.
With the development of science and technology, there is an increasing demand for energy storage batteries. Aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIBs) are expected to become the next generation of commercialized energy storage devices due to their advantages. The aqueous zinc ion battery is generally composed of zinc metal as the anode, active material as the cathode, and aqueous electrolyte. However, there are still many problems with the cathode/anode material and voltage window of the battery, which limit its use. This review introduces the recent research progress of zinc-ion batteries, including the advantages and disadvantages, energy storage mechanisms, and common cathode/anode materials, electrolytes, etc. It also gives a summary of the current research status of each material and provides solutions to the problems they face. Finally, it looks at the future direction and methods to optimize the performance of zinc-ion full batteries.
Rationally design the morphology and structure of electroactive nanomaterials is an effective approach to enhance the performance of aqueous batteries. Herein, we co-engineered the hollow architecture and interlayer spacing of layered double hydroxides (LDH) to achieve high electrochemical activity. The hierarchical hollow LDH was prepared from bimetallic zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIF) by a facile cation exchange strategy. Zn and Cu elements were selected as the second metals incorporated in Co-ZIF. The characteristics of the corresponding derivatives were studied. Besides, the transformation mechanism of CoZn-ZIF into nanosheet-assembled hollow CoZnNi LDH (denoted as CoZnNi-OH) was systematically investigated. Importantly, the interlayer spacing of CoZnNi-OH expands due to Zn2+ incorporation. The prepared CoZnNi-OH offers large surface area, exposed active sites, and rapid mass transfer/diffusion rate, which lead to a significant enhancement in the specific capacitance, rate performance, and cycle stability of CoZnNi-OH electrode. In addition, the aqueous alkaline CoZnNi-OH//Zn showed a maximum energy density/power density of 0.924 mWh/cm2, 8.479 mW/cm2. This work not only raises an insightful strategy for regulating the morphology and interlayer spacing of LDH, but also provides a reference of designing hollow nickel-based nanomaterials for aqueous batteries.
Silicon-air batteries (SABs), a new type of semiconductor air battery, have a high energy density. However, some side reactions in SABs cause Si anodes to be covered by a passivation layer to prevent continuous discharge, and the anode utilization rate is low. In this work, reduced graphene oxide (RGO) fabricated via high-temperature annealing or L-ascorbic acid (L.AA) reduction was first used to obtain Si nanowires/RGO-1000 (Si NWs/RGO-1000) and Si nanowires/RGO-L.AA (Si NWs/RGO-L.AA) composite anodes for SABs. It was found that RGO suppressed the passivation and self-corrosion reactions and that SABs using Si NWs/RGO-L.AA as the anode can discharge for more than 700 h, breaking the previous performance of SABs, and that the specific capacity was increased by 90.8% compared to bare Si. This work provides a new solution for the design of high specific capacity SABs with nanostructures and anode protective layers.
Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) plays a vital role in determining the ground state and forming novel electronic states of matter where heavy elements are involved. Here, the prototypical perovskite iridate oxide SrIrO3 is investigated to gain more insights into the SOC effect in the modification of electronic structure and corresponding magnetic and electrical properties. The high pressure metastable orthorhombic SrIrO3 is successfully stabilized by physical and chemical pressures, in which the chemical pressure is induced by Ru doping in Ir site and Mg substitution of Sr position. Detailed structural, magnetic, electrical characterizations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the substitution of Ru for Ir renders an enhanced metallic characteristic, while the introduction of Mg into Sr site results in an insulating state with 10.1% negative magnetoresistance at 10 K under 7 T. Theoretical calculations indicate that Ru doping can weaken the SOC effect, leading to the decrease of orbital energy difference between J1/2 and J3/2, which is favorable for electron transport. On the contrary, Mg doping can enhance the SOC effect, inducing a metal-insulator-transition (MIT). The electronic phase transition is further revealed by DFT calculations, confirming that the strong SOC and electron-electron interactions can lead to the emergence of insulating state. These findings underline the intricate correlations between lattice degrees of freedom and SOC in determining the ground state, which effectively stimulate the physical pressure between like structures by chemical compression.
Carbon dots (CDs)-based composites have shown impressive performance in fields of information encryption and sensing, however, a great challenge is to simultaneously implement multi-mode luminescence and room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) detection in single system due to the formidable synthesis. Herein, a multifunctional composite of Eu&CDs@pRHO has been designed by co-assembly strategy and prepared via a facile calcination and impregnation treatment. Eu&CDs@pRHO exhibits intense fluorescence (FL) and RTP coming from two individual luminous centers, Eu3+ in the free pores and CDs in the interrupted structure of RHO zeolite. Unique four-mode color outputs including pink (Eu3+, ex. 254 nm), light violet (CDs, ex. 365 nm), blue (CDs, 254 nm off), and green (CDs, 365 nm off) could be realized, on the basis of it, a preliminary application of advanced information encoding has been demonstrated. Given the free pores of matrix and stable RTP in water of confined CDs, a visual RTP detection of Fe3+ ions is achieved with the detection limit as low as 9.8 µmol/L. This work has opened up a new perspective for the strategic amalgamation of luminous guests with porous zeolite to construct the advanced functional materials.
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