Apr 29 2019
With the progress of renewable energy such as solar and wind energy, several critical issues in energy and environment will be steadily enhanced. However, the solar and wind energy also display drawbacks like discontinuity, instability, and uncontrollability, resulting in massive unusable energy. To solve such problems, additional development of energy storage and conversion materials for mass energy storage is crucially needed.
Carbon materials, particularly two-dimensional carbon materials, such as graphene and graphdiyne, have extremely conjugated carbon skeleton, evenly distributed pore, and two-dimensional layered plane features which have garnered widespread attention.
A research team guided by Prof. HUANG Changshui from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), discovered that the rich acetylenic linkers of graphdiyne could serve as the active site of reaction as well as the attachment sites for heteroatoms. They exploited this characteristic to prepare the heteroatomic (such as nitrogen, iron, sulfur, etc.) doped graphdiyne materials.
Graphdiyne, which are made up of phenyl rings and alkyne bonds, possess larger porous structure and copious sp-hybridized carbon atoms, which can offer plentiful ion channels and catalytic active sites.
The heteroatom doped graphdiyne with a lot more active sites and catalytic centers could be employed in electrochemical energy storage with improved performance.
Additional application studies revealed that the doped graphdiyne materials displayed optimized electrochemical properties in a number of applications such as lithium ion batteries, sodium ion capacitors, lithium ion capacitors, and electrocatalysis devices.
All these results have importance for the progress and preparation of new carbon materials and their energy storage applications.
Connected study results were published in Carbon, Chem. Eur. J., ChemSusChem, and ChemElectroChem.
This research received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Frontier Science Research Project of CAS, and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province for Distinguished Young Scholars.