Preparation and electrochemical properties of graphene quantum dots/biomass activated carbon electrodes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inoche.2019.107718Get rights and content

Highlights

  • RHAC were successfully modified by GQDs.

  • RHAC-GQDs exhibits perfect electrochemical performance for lithium ion battery.

  • This method extends the application field of RHAC.

Abstract

Graphene quantum dots and biomass activated carbon have enormous potential for electrochemical application, which composites as anode materials for lithium ion battery are rarely reported. Here, the rice husk based activated carbon was modified by graphene quantum dots, exhibiting excellent electrochemical performance as an electrode for lithium ion battery. The results show that, with the introduction of graphene quantum dots, the charge transfer resistance of the electrode was reduced from 577.7 Ω to 123.9 Ω, and the lithium ion diffusion coefficient was increased by 175 times. Meanwhile, the introduction of graphene quantum dots plays an important role in improving the cycle stability of the battery.

Graphical abstract

The rice husk based activated carbon modified by graphene quantum dots exhibits excellent electrochemical performance as an electrode for lithium ion battery, which reduces the charge transfer resistance, increases the lithium ion diffusion coefficient and improves the cycle stability of the battery.

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Introduction

With the rapid development of science and technology, the photoelectric materials have attracted much attention due to their unique properties [1], [2]. Especially, the lithium ion battery is one of the most popular photoelectric materials, such as the mobile phones, hybrid vehicles, aeronautical facility and so on [3], [4]. With the extensive application, the lithium ion battery with better performance is expected, which will be realized by improving the electrochemical properties of anode materials.

In recent years, the biomass waste has become to be a kind of functional material and attracted extensive attention from researchers at home and abroad due to its low cost, environmental protection and recyclability. Furthermore, the activated carbon, as the high value-added products of biomass waste, exhibits good electrochemical property for their high specific surface area and plentiful cavity [5], [6], [7], [8]. So far, the research on the electrochemical properties of activated carbon has mainly focused on the applications of double-layer capacitance [9], [10], [11] and super capacitor [12], [13]. In contrast, there are rare reports on the biomass carbon as an electrode of lithium ion battery. Fey et al. [14] obtained activated carbon via high temperature pyrolysis of rice husk and they have demonstrated that the introduction of rice husk based activated carbon as electrode material can improve the electrochemical property of lithium ion battery. Although this kind of lithium ion battery owns high specific capacity, the efficiency is still lower, which is necessary to do further regulation and improvement. Similarly, Li et al. [15] extracted activated carbon from grapefruit skin. Then, the activated carbon doped with Fe3O4 was used for anode material of lithium ion battery. This study has proved that the discharge specific capacity of lithium ion battery is still high under high current density.

As a member of the graphene family, graphene quantum dots (GQDs) have nanoscale dimension with a few nanometers. Due to their unique quantum confinement effect and boundary effect [16], [17], [18], [19], GQDs are usually used as a modified material to improve the property of raw materials. This composite modified by GQDs has broad application in the field of super capacitor [20], optoelectronic device [21] and lithium ion battery [22], [23], [24]. Although both of the biomass carbon and GQDs have great potential in the electrochemical application, there are few reports on the electrochemical performance of their composite material.

Here, we propose an innovative anode material to explore the electrochemical property of lithium ion battery. This innovative material composes of rice husk-based activated carbon (RHAC) and GQDs modified with phenylalanine. The study results show that with the introduction of GQDs, the charge transfer resistance of the electrode is reduced from 577.7 Ω to 123.9 Ω, and the lithium ion diffusion coefficient is increased by 175 times. Meanwhile, the introduction of GQDs plays an important role in improving the cycle stability of the battery.

Section snippets

Analysis of specific surface area and pore structure for RHAC

The specific surface area and pore volume of the RHAC are 1722 m2/g and 1.86 mL/g, respectively. As shown in Fig. 1(a), the adsorption capacity of RHAC increases sharply at lower P/P0 value, which indicates that the micropore accounts for a large proportion. Furthermore, a hysteresis loop appearing in the curve indicates that there exists mesoporous structure. Fig. 1(b) shows the pore size distribution of RHAC. Clearly, the pore structure of RHAC mainly consists of micropores structure with the

Conclusions

Briefly, RHAC modified with GQDs has higher discharge capacity, higher coulombic efficiency value, better rate performance and electrical conductivity, which indicate that GQDs can efficiently improve the electrochemical performance of RHAC. Moreover, the RHAC-GQDs composite exhibits good cycle stability, indicating that RHAC-GQDs has a promising application t in the research field of lithium ion battery.

Reagents and instruments

Phosphoric acid of analytical grade (AR) is purchased from Aladdin Reagent Co. Ltd. Acetylene black (AR), citric acid and phenylalanine are purchased from Sinopharm Chemical Reagent Co., Ltd, Shanghai. All of the reagents are directly used without any further purification. Sodium alginate (AR) is purchased from Sigma-Aldrich Inc. LiPF6 electrolyte (1 mol L−1, EC + EDC) is purchased from Taiyuan Liyuan Lithium Battery Technology Co. Ltd.

A muffle furnace (SX2-8-10, Shanghai ZheTai Machinery

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ying Li: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Resources, Writing - original draft. Feifei Wu: Methodology, Investigation, Resources, Writing - original draft. Xuan Jin: Writing - review & editing, Data curation. Humin Xu: Data curation. Xuefeng Liu: Investigation. Gang Shi: Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (21671081), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JUSRP51626B) and MOE & SAFEA for the 111 Project (B13025).

References (29)

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Author Contributions: Y. Li and F. Wu contributed equally.

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