231 / 2022-02-15 16:29:57

Design of scalable dendritic copper as high specific surface area support for efficient energy storage

scalable copper,electrode materials,energy storage,cation doping

Mineral Materials and Advanced Energy Materials > 5. Battery Materials and Waste Management

Design and fabrication of novel electrode materials with excellent specific capacitance and cycle stability is urgent for the advanced energy storage devices, which depends on the electrode materials. Recently, three factors for advanced electrode materials have revealed by experimental investigations and reviews: (i) doping other metal cations into monometallic active material to optimize the utilization of pseudocapacitance and improve surface activity, (ii) the development of tunable support with high surface area, low ion diffusion resistivity and outstanding electron conductivity, (iii) the in situ growth of active materials on ideal supports to reduce contact resistance and the ineffective area. Herein, we report scalable leaf-shaped nanostructured copper with controllable morphology (the length of branch ranging from 2 µm to 30 µm and the diameters is between 40-80 nm), which can be adjusted by electrodeposition voltage and time. The selfstanding scalable dendritic copper offer large surface area and promote fast electron transport. Further, NiCoP nanosheets array were in situ grown on the 3D copper by a novel electrodeposition method, this 3DCu@ NiCoP electrode manifests a markedly improved electrochemical performance with a high specific capacity of ~1645 C g⁻¹ at 1 A g⁻¹ and an outstanding rate capability (1529 C g⁻¹ at 20 A g⁻¹) due to its compositional and structural advantages. These findings may shed some lights into the rational design of transition metal compounds with tunable architectures by multiple modification methods for efficient energy storage.