Self-Assembled Porous-Silica within N-Doped Carbon Nanofibers as Ultra-flexible Anodes for Soft Lithium Batteries.

ABSTRACT: Silica is an attractive anode material for soft lithium batteries owing to its high specific capacity, but it suffers severe problems of large volume change and unstable solid-electrolyte interface. Moreover, it is a challenge to fabricate flexible silica anodes. Here, we report a low-cost and scalable strategy to create flexible anodes of N-doped carbon nanofiber-confined porous silica (p-SiO₂@N-CNF) by developing a sol-gel electrospinning process followed by carbonization. This approach causes the p-SiO₂ nanoparticles (NPs) to be self-assembled within the N-CNFs, which act like elastomer and electrolyte barrier to accommodate volume changes and to enhance the stability of SiO₂, whereas the NPs act as soft plasticizer providing strength to the CNF skeletons. Benefiting from the hierarchical structures, the anodes with high p-SiO₂ loadings (>1.6 mg/cm²) exhibit exceptional cycling performance (>1,000 cycles) in terms of bending, current rate, and capacity. Moreover, the batteries remain stable when discharging at 0.5 C and charging at 2 C.

SUBMITTER: Aboalhassan AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6545390 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature