Reconfiguring graphene for high-performance metal-ion battery anodes

By Shuaiwei Wang, Bao-cheng Yang, Houyang Chen, E. Ruckenstein. Energy Storage Materials, 2019

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Reconfiguring structures in materials is one of the most important building approaches in new material design. The atomically precise control of reconfiguration of two-dimensional (2D) carbon-based materials reshapes their properties for engineering applications. Herein, by employing density functional theory and tight-binding modeling, we reconfigured atomically precise structure in graphene and proposed a new 2D carbon allotrope Θ-graphene. The reconfiguring procedure adopted was realized in experiments using an electron beam. It exhibits semiconductor features with a bandgap of 0.58 eV, and is extendable to semimetal or metal. Mechanically-induced directional-dependent topological node line states are formed and their origin is the breaking of the geometrical symmetry. The reconfiguring procedure reshapes the adsorption and diffusion properties of Θ-graphene, promoting its storage capacities for metal ions (876.65/1275.12/956.34 mA h/g for Li/Na/K- ion batteries) and lowing its metal ion-diffusion energy barriers (≤ 0.48 eV) and lowing its average open circuit voltages (≤ 0.60 V). The transition from semiconductor to metal with metal ions introduced improves its high electronic conductivity, which could be beneficial to the fast charge/discharge rates. Our results show that the reconfigured structure in graphene reshapes its properties, bringing it numerous promising engineering applications such as in metal-ion batteries and in nanoelectronic devices and in energy storage. This work provides a new channel for materials design and innovation by combining the reconfiguring strategy and the structure-property-application relationship, and opens up a new strategy to extend the applications of low-dimensional materials such as graphene and to promote their application performance.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/50956aead72f6b8934ba5182e4a538e0421cbc2e