Shear-Exfoliated Phosphorene for Rechargeable Nanoscale Battery

Abstract

Discovery of atomically thin black phosphorus (called phosphorene) holds promise to be used as an alternative two-dimensional material to graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides especially as an anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, at present bulk black phosphorus (BP) still suffers from rapid capacity fading that results in poor rechargeable performance. Here, for the first time, we use in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to construct nanoscale phosphorene LIBs and visualize the capacity fading mechanism in thick multilayer phosphorene by real time capturing delithiation-induced structural decomposition that reduces electrical conductivity and thus causes irreversibility of lithiated Li3P phase. We further demonstrate that few-layer phosphorene successfully circumvents the structural decomposition and holds superior structural restorability, even subjected to multi-cycle lithiation/delithiation processes and concomitant huge volume expansion. This finding affords new experimental insights into thickness-dependent lithium diffusion kinetics in phosphorene. Additionally, a scalable liquid-phase shear exfoliation route has been developed to produce high-quality ultrathin (monolayer or few-layer) phosphorene, only by a high-speed shear mixer or even a household kitchen blender with the shear rate threshold, which will pave the way for potential large-scale applications in LIBs once the rechargeable phosphorene nanoscale batteries can be transferred to industrialized enlargement in the future.

References in corpus (11)

• Black phosphorus field-effect transistors
• Phosphorene: A New 2D Material with High Carrier Mobility
• Rediscovering Black Phosphorus: A Unique Anisotropic 2D Material for Optoelectronics and Electronics
• Strain-Engineering Anisotropic Electrical Conductance of Phosphorene and Few-Layer Black Phosphorus
• Liquid exfoliation of solvent-stabilised black phosphorus: applications beyond electronics
• Observation of tunable bandgap and anisotropic Dirac semimetal state in black phosphorus
• Solvent Exfoliation of Electronic-Grade, Two-Dimensional Black Phosphorus
• Phosphorene nanoribbons, nanotubes and van der Waals multilayers
• Oxygen defects in phosphorene
• Electric Field Induced Topological Phase Transition in Two-Dimensional Few-layer Black Phosphorus
• The potential applications of phosphorene as anode materials in Li-ion batteries