Tuesday, 31 May 2022: 08:45
West Meeting Room 216 (Vancouver Convention Center)
Tannic acid (TA) has the magnificent potentials for various electrochemical applications due to their facile coating property and the chelating ability with any metallic species. However, since the ester group present in TA is thermally decomposable, TA is prone to full thermal degradation upon the carbonization process, rarely remaining a residual carbon for further electrochemical reactions. Furthermore, the type of residual carbons is a hard carbon, which is unfavorable for the high coulombic efficiency due to their high surface area and the structural defects. To overcome this limitation and improve the carbonizability of TA, we employed a modularization strategy through rearranging the molecular structure of TA. During this rearrangement process, TA molecules simultaneously undergo C-C coupling and esterification at each aromatic unit with remarkably enhanced molecular cyclicity to generate modularly interconnected TA (m-TA). The carbonized m-TA provides high residual carbon content, indicating the soft carbon behavior (42% @ 900℃). Furthermore, after the incorporation of metallic species to form modularly interconnected metal-phenolic networks (m-MPN), the graphitic sp2 domains hybridized with metalized nanoclusters present in m-MPN synergistically imparted outstanding ionic and electrical conductivities in the carbonized m-MPN after pyrolysis. The ideally created new electrochemical platform of the carbonized m-MPN was utilized as a supportive layer of silicon nanoparticles (Si@C/metal). Especially, various types of metals (Ni, Fe and Sn) were introduced to the carbon layers indicating diverse functions for the electrochemical performance, establishing a highly stable and active anode for lithium ion battery systems.