High-Quality Graphene Microflower Design for High-Performance Li–S and Al-Ion Batteries

4 years ago

High-Quality Graphene Microflower Design for High-Performance Li–S and Al-Ion Batteries

Bingna Zheng, Hao Chen, Xiaoli Zhao, Chen Chen, Tieqi Huang, Nimrodh Ananth, Chao Gao, Weiwei Gao, Li Peng, Yingjun Liu

Poor quality and insufficient productivity are two main obstacles for the practical application of graphene in electrochemical energy storage. Here, high-quality crumpled graphene microflower (GmF) for high-performance electrodes is designed. The GmF possesses four advantages simultaneously: highly crystallized defect-free graphene layers, low stacking degree, sub-millimeter continuous surface, and large productivity with low cost. When utilized as carbon host for sulfur cathode, the GmF-sulfur hybrid delivers decent areal capacities of 5.2 mAh cm−2 at 0.1 C and 3.8 mAh cm−2 at 0.5 C. When utilized as cathode of Al-ion battery, the GmF affords a high capacity of 100 mAh g−1 with 100% capacity retention after 5000 cycles and excellent rate capability from 0.1 to 20 A g−1. This facile and large-scale producible GmF represents a meaningful high-quality graphene powder for practical energy storage technology. Meanwhile, this unique high-quality graphene design provides an effective route to improve electrochemical properties of graphene-based electrodes. Scalable high-quality graphene microflower (GmF) is produced through facial spray drying and annealing steps, which combines the sub-millimeter continuous highly crystallized graphene surface with mesoporous and few-stacked structures. GmF3000 affords remarkable electrochemical properties in both Li–S and Al-ion batteries, demonstrating great significance of high-quality graphene design in energy storage technologies.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201700051