Liu, Y., Carvalho, A., Lai, W., Pu, Y., Zhang, Z., Lim, S. X., Castro Neto, A. H., Gupta, P., & Sow, C. H. (2025). Enhanced battery performance by fluorescent defects engineering in hard carbon anodes. Chemical Engineering Journal, 514, 163279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2025.163279
Abstract:
The availability and accessibility of economical renewable energy remains a key driving factor towards encouraging the uptake of clean energy. By incorporating economical hard carbon (HC), recycled from waste into anodes for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), and treating the resulting HC-anode with a focused laser beam, the functionalised HC-anode exhibits enhanced electrochemical performance with a specific capacity of 516 mAh g-1 at
0.1 A g-1. It achieves over 100% capacity retention for 700 cycles at 1 A g-1, and demonstrates super-long durability for 4000 cycles at 2 A g-1. The improvements are attributed to laser-tunable expanded interlayer spacing and fluorescing defects in the engineered HC-anode. DFT calculations further established that these fluorescent defects correspond to carbon vacancies (cyan fluorescence), and their complexes with H heteroatoms (green fluorescence). These defects lead to the improved electrochemical performance via enhancing Li+ adsorption energies. Given such correlation, fluorescence studies are proposed as an interesting mechanism for guiding the development of carbon materials for energy applications, which serves as a highly efficient tool for assessing the electrochemical performance, eliminating the need for costly battery fabrication and testing processes. The performance achieved and its correlation to the observable fluorescence will not only contribute towards the effort of making cheaper batteries with better performance, but also serves as a rapid and scalable probe for preliminary evaluation of battery performance.
License type:
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the Singapore MOE-ARC grant - NA
Grant Reference no. : A-8001494-00-00