Green and Facile Fabrication of Hollow Porous MnO/C Microspheres from Microalgaes for Lithium-Ion Batteries

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers

Abstract

Hollow porous micro/nanostructures with high surface area and shell permeability have attracted tremendous attention. Particularly, the synthesis and structural tailoring of diverse hollow porous materials is regarded as a crucial step toward the realization of high-performance electrode materials, which has several advantages including a large contact area with electrolyte, a superior structural stability, and a short transport path for Li(+) ions. Meanwhile, owing to the inexpensive, abundant, environmentally benign, and renewable biological resources provided by nature, great efforts have been devoted to understand and practice the biotemplating technology, which has been considered as an effective strategy to achieve morphology-controllable materials with structural specialty, complexity, and related unique properties. Herein, we are inspired by the natural microalgae with its special features (easy availability, biological activity, and carbon sources) to develop a green and facile biotemplating method to fabricate monodisperse MnO/C microspheres for lithium-ion batteries. Due to the unique hollow porous structure in which MnO nanoparticles were tightly embedded into a porous carbon matrix and form a penetrative shell, MnO/C microspheres exhibited high reversible specific capacity of 700 mAh g(-1) at 0.1 A g(-1), excellent cycling stability with 94% capacity retention, and enhanced rate performance of 230 mAh g(-1) at 3 A g(-1). This green, sustainable, and economical strategy will extend the scope of biotemplating synthesis for exploring other functional materials in various structure-dependent applications such as catalysis, gas sensing, and energy storage.

Related Papers

• → Supercapacitors as next generation energy storage devices: Properties and applications(2022)789 cited
• → Metrics for Fast Supercapacitors as Energy Storage Devices(2018)44 cited
• → Research on Energy Density and Specific Capacitance of Aqueous Supercapacitors(2021)5 cited
• → Fabrication Temperature-Related Porosity Effects on the Mechanical Properties of Additively Manufactured CFRP Composites(2022)1 cited
• → Design and synthesis of materials for supercapacitors with enhanced energy storage performance(2020)