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  • Chaonan Gu, Jingjing Li, Guang Yang, Liming Zhang, Chun-Sen Liu, Huan Pang
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2263-2267.

    This work introduces a simple and facile approach for the morphology and size controlled synthesis of Co-doped MIL-96. By using different bases as modulators, Co-doped MIL-96 was obtained with sizes that varied from 5 μm to 300 nm, and four different morphologies, including hexagonal prism, icosahedron, hexagonal spindle and ellipsoid. Among these, nano-sized Co-doped MIL-96 with an ellipsoid morphology exhibited the highest electroactive surface area and good conductivity as well as the best electrochemical sensing performance towards α-fetoprotein.

  • Qi Wang, Shiyong Chu, Shaohua Guo
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2167-2176.

    As one of the most promising secondary batteries in large-scale energy storage, sodium ion batteries (SIBs) have attracted wide attention due to the abundant raw materials and low cost. Layered transition metal oxides are one kind of popular cathode material candidates because of its easy synthesis and large theoretical specific capacity. Yet, the most common P2 and O3 phases show distinct structural characteristics respectively. O3 phase can serve as a sodium reservoir, but it usually suffers from serious phase transition and sluggish kinetics. For the P2 phase, it allows the fast sodium ion migration in the bulk and the structure can maintain stable, but it is lack of sodium, showing a great negative effect on Coulombic efficiency in full cell. Thus, single phase structure almost cannot achieve satisfied comprehensive sodium storage performances. Under these circumstances, exploiting novel multiphase cathodes showing synergetic effect may give solution to these problems. In this review, we summarize the recent development of multiphase layered transition metal oxide cathodes of SIBs, analyze the mechanism and prospect the future potential research directions.

  • Xiaobang Liu, Ting Yue, Kai Qi, Yubing Qiu, Bao Yu Xia, Xingpeng Guo
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2189-2201.

    Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), as an emerging family of porous inorganic-organic crystal materials, exhibit widely applications in gas storage and separation, drug release, sensing, and catalysis, owing to easily adjustable pore sizes, uniformly distributed metal centers, high surface areas, and tunable functionalities. However, MOF crystal powders are usually difficult to be directly applied into specific devices because of their brittleness, insolubility and low compatibility. Therefore, to expand versatile MOF membranes with robustness and operational flexibility is urgent to satisfy practical applications. Although numerous reports have reviewed the synthesis and applications of MOF membranes, relatively few reports the electrocatalytic properties based on MOF membranes. Herein, this mini-review provides an overview of preparation of MOF membranes, including directed synthesis, secondary growth and electrochemical deposition method. Meanwhile, fabrication of ultrathin 2D MOF nanosheets those can be also defined as a kind of nanoscale MOF membranes is also mentioned. Electrocatalytic performance of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) for diverse MOF membranes/nanosheets and their derivatives are introduced.

  • Bo Fang, Zong Liu, Yufei Bao, Ligang Feng
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2259-2262.

    Significance of unstable species leaching was for the first time demonstrated on MOF-derived catalysts by taking PtNi-C as an example, that was instructive for the relevant catalyst fabrication and performance study. PtNi-C catalyst was synthesized by combining Pt nanoparticles with Ni-BTC after annealing in the tube furnace and the unstable Ni species can be easily leached out in nitric acid, and the stable PtNi nanoparticles trapped in the graphite carbon layer were obtained. The greatly improved catalytic ability for alcohol fuels oxidation was verified by comparing the fresh and acid leached catalysts in terms of the high peak current density, specific and mass activity and rapid charge transfer kinetics and high catalytic stability. The current work guides the importance of unstable assistant promoter removal for the MOF derived catalysts.

  • Shuxian Sun, Fuqin Han, Xiaoliang Wu, Zhuangjun Fan
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2235-2238.

    We report a convenient method to synthesize O, N-codoped hierarchical porous carbon by one-step carbonization of the mixture of KHCO3, urea and alginic acid. Benefiting from KHCO3 and urea synergistic effect, the obtained O, N-codoped hierarchical porous carbon (NPC-700) material has a well-developed interconnected porous framework with ultrahigh specific surface area (2846 m2/g) and massive heteroatoms functional groups. Consequence, such porous carbon displays high specific capacitance (324 F/g at 1 A/g), excellent rate performance (212 F/g at 30 A/g) and good electrochemical stabilization in 6 mol/L KOH solution. More importantly, the assembled NPC-700//NPC-700 symmetrical supercapacitor can achieve a high energy density of 18.8 Wh/kg and good electrochemical stabilization in 1 mol/L Na2SO4 solution. This process opens up a new way to design heteroatoms-doped hierarchical porous carbon derived from biomass materials for supercapacitors.

  • Zuoji Liu, Chengjia Bao, Guangjun Zhang, Kai Zhang, Gangtie Lei, Qiang Zhang, Qiang Peng, Yu Liu
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2459-2464.

    In this article, three novel and simple molecular structure with donor-acceptor (D-A) type copolymers via only head-to-head alkoxy (OR) and/or alkylthio (SR) side chains onto the bithiophene (BT) as donor units and fluorinated benzotriazole (FBTA) as acceptor unit, namely, PBTOR-FBTA, PBTOSR-FBTA and PBTSRFBTA, were successfully designed and synthesized. The impacts of sulfur-oxygen (S⋯O) or sulfur-sulfur (S⋯S) noncovalent interactions on their physicochemical properties, molecular stacking, carrier mobility, morphologies of blend films, as well as their photovoltaic performance were deeply and systematically studied. The introduction of SR side-chains suddenly lowered the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energy levels, blue-shifted absorption, enhanced π-π stacking, as well as improved morphology of the photoactive layer blends in comparison with the reference polymer without SR side-chain. Polymer solar cells (PSCs) were fabricated to estimate their photovoltaic performance of the polymers. Under an optimized blend ratio of PBTSR-FBTA:PC71BM (1:0.8, w/w), the PBTSR-FBTAbased device exhibits a higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 6.25%, which is about 3.34 and 1.87 folds than that of the PBTOR-FBTA and PBTOSR-FBTA-based devices, respectively. Our research results demonstrate that the modification of the simple and low-cost SR side chains is an effective strategy to improve the photovoltaic performance of the polymers.

  • Li Sun, Kai Wang, Ningning Li, Jun Zhang, Xiangxin Guo, Xianghong Liu
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2333-2338.

    Transition metal oxides with high capacity are considered a promising electrode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Nevertheless, the huge volume expansion and poor conductivity severely hamper their practical application. In this work, a carbon riveting method is reported to address the above issues by designing multilayered N-doped carbon (N-carbon) enveloped Fe3O4/graphene nanosheets. When evaluated as a negative electrode, the N-carbon/Fe3O4/graphene nanocomposites demonstrate greatly enhanced electrochemical properties compared with Fe3O4/graphene. The N-carbon/Fe3O4/graphene presents a superior reversible capacity (807 mAh/g) over Fe3O4/graphene (540 mAh/g). Furthermore, it affords a considerable capacity of 550 mAh/g at 1 A/g over 700 cycles, indicating superb cycling stability. The structure-property correlation studies reveal that the carbon riveting layer is essential for enhancing the lithium diffusion kinetics. The good electrochemical properties and effective structure design make the carbon riveting strategy quite general and reliable to manipulate high performance electrodes for future LIBs.

  • Yan Li, Yuying Shan, Huan Pang
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2280-2286.

    In order to further improve the potential application of nickel-cobalt oxide (NiCoO) in supercapacitors, we use controlled calcination of different Ni-Co-MOF ([NiCo(HBTC)(4, 4'-bipy)]) composites to obtain five kinds of nickel doped NiCoO (N-NiCoO) with different Ni/Co molar ratio. These N-NiCoO materials with unique hexagonal nanoplates structure, high specific surface area and high porosity indicate high and stable electrochemical activity. In particular, N-NiCoO-2 with a Ni/Co molar ratio of 2:1 exhibits the highest 945.79 F/g specific capacitance at 1 A/g and a high cycle stability of only 6.7% attenuation after 5000 cycles. Apart from the certain percentage of NiCoO with higher conductivity, nitrogen doping provides more reactive sites and the specific porous hexagonal nanoplates structure of the product itself accelerate electron transfer and promote electrolyte diffusion can more effectively enhance the electrochemical performance. Therefore, N-NiCoO synthesized via a simple method exhibit exciting potential and can be used as an electrode material for supercapacitors with good performance.

  • Xiu Qian, Siyu Deng, Xiang Chen, Qiang Gao, Yun-Long Hou, Aiwu Wang, Lizhuang Chen
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2211-2214.

    A highly stable and luminescent metal-organic framework (LMOF) with layered structure, namely, C6H4N5OZn (1) has been successfully achieved and fully characterized by single crystal X-ray diffraction, powder X-ray diffractions, fluorescence titration and thermogravimetry. This blue-light emitting compound 1 exhibit outstanding stability and can detect Fe3+ and Cu2+ in water specifically, presenting potential application in the field of fluorescent probe technology. Fluorescence titration experiments indicate that the detection of Fe3+ ions by 1 is more significant than that of Cu2+ ions in terms of Ksv value. Furthermore, guest-assisted exfoliation of layered MOF 1 is efficiently carried out through ether O—H hydrogen bond or π···π interactions between the layered host structure and intercalated guest molecules (4, 4'-oxybisbenzoic acid and triphenylamine). Tyndal scattering was observed in the suspensions of obtained MOF nanosheets. This study shows that the compound 1 with unique metal ion sensing properties can be applied as a probe material in water pollution treatment field, but also opens up the opportunity for synthesizing luminescent MONs through the "bottom-up" guest intercalation methodology.

  • Yongqiang Ding, Yali Li, Junshuai Li, Xingbin Yan
    Chinese Chemical Letters. 2020, 31(9): 2219-2224.

    Sodium ion hybrid capacitors are of great concern in large-scale and cost-effective electrical energy storage owing to their high energy and power densities, as well as natural abundance and wide distribution of sodium. However, it is difficult to find a well-pleasing anode material that matches the high-performance cathode materials to achieve good energy and power output for sodium ion hybrid capacitors. In this paper, nitrogen and sulfur co-doped nanotube-like carbon prepared by a simple carbonization process of high sulfur-loaded polyaniline nanotubes is introduced as the anode. The assembled sodium ion half cell based on the optimal nanotube-like carbon delivers a high reversible capacity of ~304.8 mAh/g at 0.2 A/g and an excellent rate performance of ~124.8 mAh/g at 10 A/g in a voltage window of 0.01-2.5 V (versus sodium/sodium ion). For the hybrid capacitors assembled using the optimal nanotube-like carbon as the anode and high-capacity activated carbon as the cathode, high energy densities of ~100.2 Wh/kg at 250 W/kg and ~50.69 Wh/kg at 12, 500 W/kg are achieved.

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