Hollow double-layer carbon nanocage confined Si nanoparticles for high performance lithium-ion batteries

Jijun Lu; Dong Wang; Junhao Liu; Guoyu Qian; Yanan Chen; Zhi Wang

doi:10.1039/d0na00297f

Hollow double-layer carbon nanocage confined Si nanoparticles for high performance lithium-ion batteries

Nanoscale Adv. 2020 May 25;2(8):3222-3230. doi: 10.1039/d0na00297f. eCollection 2020 Aug 11.

Authors

Jijun Lu^{1

2

3}, Dong Wang¹, Junhao Liu¹, Guoyu Qian¹, Yanan Chen³, Zhi Wang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Green Process and Engineering, National Engineering Laboratory for Hydrometallurgical Cleaner Production Technology, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 P. R. China [email protected].
² School of Chemical Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100039 P. R. China.
³ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Advanced Ceramics and Machining Technology of Ministry of Education, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Composite and Functional Materials, Tianjin University Tianjin 300072 P. R. China [email protected].

Abstract

The huge volume variation and the unstable solid electrolyte interface (SEI) of Si (Si) during the lithiation and delithiation process severely obstruct its practical application as lithium-ion battery anodes. Here, we design and fabricate a hollow structure of double-layer hybrid carbon nanocage encapsulated Si nanoparticles to address these challenges. The double-layer hybrid carbon-Si nanoarchitecture is obtained by integrating electrostatic self-assembly, seed-induced growth and heterogeneous shrinkage. The internal layer of hollow N-doped carbon of the hybrid nanoarchitecture (Si@H-NC@GC) provides limited inner space for controlling volume changes of Si nanoparticles, while the outer graphite carbon layer facilitates the formation of a stable SEI. When evaluated as anode materials for LIBs, the Si@H-NC@GC nanoarchitecture exhibits greatly enhanced electrochemical performance compared with the bare Si, Si@NC and H-NC@GC electrodes. Notably, Si@H-NC@GC delivers a reversible capacity retention of 92.5% after 550 cycles at a high current density of 1 A g^-1 and a high capacity of 1081 mA h g^-1 after 500 cycles at 0.5 A g^-1.