With this technology, lithium-ion batteries are expected to become even thinner, lighter, and more durable in the future.
The increasing demand for user portability and the limitations of space necessitate high volumetric energy density in today's lithium-ion batteries. Nanotechnology can make batteries "lighter," but due to the lower density of nanomaterials, "smaller" has become a major challenge for researchers in the energy storage field. Carbon cage structures constructed from carbon nanomaterials are considered the main means to solve the problem of huge volume expansion when lithium is intercalated into non-carbon anode materials such as tin and silicon. Precise customization of carbon cage structures is an essential path to the industrialization of new high-performance anode materials.
Professor Yang Quan Hong's research team invented a sulfur template technology for precisely customizing dense porous carbon cages based on graphene interface assembly. Utilizing a capillary evaporation densification strategy using graphene gel, they successfully solved the bottleneck problem of the trade-off between high density and porosity in carbon materials, successfully obtaining high-density porous carbon materials. This "tailor-made" design concept of carbon cage structures based on graphene assembly can be extended to a universal strategy for constructing electrode materials for next-generation high-energy lithium-ion batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries, and lithium-air batteries, thus potentially enabling energy storage batteries to achieve "small size" and "high capacity."
