Hyphae-mediated bioassembly of carbon fibers derivatives for advanced battery energy storage

Abstract

Ingenious design and fabrication of advanced carbon-based sulfur cathodes are extremely important to the development of high-energy lithium-sulfur batteries, which hold promise as the next-generation power source. Herein, for the first time, we report a novel versatile hyphae-mediated biological assembly technology to achieve scale production of hyphae carbon fibers (HCFs) derivatives, in which different components including carbon, metal compounds, and semiconductors can be homogeneously assembled with HCFs to form composite networks. The mechanism of biological adsorption assembly is also proposed. As a representative, reduced graphene oxides (rGOs) decorated with hollow carbon spheres (HCSs) successfully co-assemble with HCFs to form HCSs@rGOs/HCFs hosts for sulfur cathodes. In this unique architecture, not only large accommodation space for sulfur but also restrained volume expansion and fast charge transport paths are realized. Meanwhile, multiscale physical barriers plus chemisorption sites are simultaneously established to anchor soluble lithium polysulfides. Accordingly, the designed HCSs@rGOs/HCFs-S cathodes deliver a high capacity (1189 mA h g⁻¹ at 0.1 C) and good high-rate capability (686 mA h g⁻¹ at 5 C). Our work provides a new approach for the preparation of high-performance carbon-based electrodes for energy storage devices.

Keywords

bioassembly / carbon fibers / energy storage / graphene / lithium-sulfur batteries

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2024 The Authors. Carbon Energy published by Wenzhou University and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.