Waste Biomass Derived Active Carbon as Cost-Effective and Environment-Friendly Cathode Material for Lithium-Oxygen Batteries

Abstract

Due to the development needs of electric transportation as well as sustainability and physical health, lithium-oxygen batteries (LOBs) have attracted much attention with its superior theoretical specific energy density. In this study, we report our findings on a biomass material, oak-derived carbon (ODC), which is served as an efficient cathodic catalyst in LOBs system for the first time. In contrast to traditional commercial carbon catalysts, biomaterials are abundant in heteroatoms, such as N, P and S, leading to a substantial increase in electrochemical activity of cathodes. Compared with functional doped carbon, natural biomass carbon with abundant and uniform heteroatoms is easy to obtain and low in price. In this work, LOBs with the optimized ODC cathodes present the highest discharge capacity of 37000 mAh g−1, the number of which is among the best, and the batteries keep stable over 400 cycles, suggesting a great prospect.