Engineering Graphenes from the Nano- to the Macroscale for Electrochemical Energy Storage

Abstract

Carbon is a key component in current electrochemical energy storage (EES) devices and plays a crucial role in the improvement in energy and power densities for the future EES devices. As the simplest carbon and the basic unit of all sp ² carbons, graphene is widely used in EES devices because of its fascinating and outstanding physicochemical properties; however, when assembled in the macroscale, graphene-derived materials do not demonstrate their excellence as individual sheets mostly because of unavoidable stacking. This review proposal shows to engineer graphene nanosheets from the nano- to the macroscale in a well-designed and controllable way and discusses how the performance of the graphene-derived carbons depends on the individual graphene sheets, nanostructures, and macrotextures. Graphene-derived carbons in EES applications are comprehensively reviewed with three representative devices, supercapacitors, lithium-ion batteries, and lithium–sulfur batteries. The review concludes with a comment on the opportunities and challenges for graphene-derived carbons in the rapidly growing EES research area.

Keywords

Carbons / Graphene nanosheets / Nanostructures / Macroforms / Electrochemical energy storage

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Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China(U1710109, 51772164, 51525204, 21506212)

Shenzhen Basic Research Project(JCYJ20150529164918734, JCYJ20170412171630020, JCYJ20170412171359175)