(23e) Carbon-Based Nanostructured Electrodes for High Performance Rechargeable Battery Applications

Large-scale energy storage applications, such as electric vehicle, smart-grid, and renewable energy storage, drive the development of more sustainable and affordable carbon-based organic electrodes. Recently, it has been shown that oxygen functional groups on the surface of carbon materials, such as graphene oxide and carbon nanotube (CNT), can react with Li-ions reversibly at ~3 V vs Li, proposing these oxidized carbons as new rising positive electrodes for the Li-ion batteries. As the redox reactions primarily take place on the surface of the carbons, with no intercalation reactions involved, these electrodes generally show both high power and high energy density, and good cycling stability. In this work, we demonstrate high-performance nanostructured graphene oxide and CNT electrodes including the surface redox reaction between oxygen functional groups and lithium ions. The synthesized nanostructured carbon electrodes showed high gravimetric capacity of ~140 mAh/g in two electrode lithium-cells.  We further demonstrate these nanostructured carbon electrodes are promising substrates for nano-scale coatings of various oxides, molecules, and polymers to design high-performance energy storage devices.