Exfoliated Triazine-Based Covalent Organic Nanosheets with Multielectron Redox for High-Performance Lithium Organic Batteries

The development of the next-generation lithium ion battery requires environmental-friendly electrode materials with long cycle life and high energy density. Organic compounds are a promising potential source of electrode materials for lithium ion batteries due to their advantages of chemical richness at the molecular level, cost benefit, and environmental friendliness, but they suffer from low capacity and dissatisfactory cycle life mainly due to hydrophobic dissolution in organic electrolytes and poor electronic conductivity. In this work, two types of triazine-based covalent organic nanosheets (CONs) are exfoliated and composited with carbon nanotubes. The thin-layered 2D structure for the exfoliated CONs can activate more functional groups for lithium storage and boost the utilization efficiency of redox sites compared to its bulk counterpart. Large reversible capacities of above 1000 mAh g⁻¹ can be achieved after 250 cycles, which is comparable to high-capacity inorganic electrodes. Moreover, the lithium-storage mechanism is determined to be an intriguing 11 and 16 electron redox reaction, associated with the organic groups (unusual triazine ring, piperazine ring, and benzene ring, and common CN, NH groups). © 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim