Academic News: HBU Made Important Breakthrough in Layered Copper-Anthraquinone Coordination Polymer Lithium Battery Cathodes
Recently, the Advanced Energy Storage Materials and Battery Team of the College of Chemistry and Materials Science has achieved an important breakthrough in the field of high-performance metal-organic coordination polymer lithium-ion battery cathodes. The related achievement, titled "Layered Copper-Anthraquinone Coordination Polymer Cathode Leveraging Dual-Redox Sites and Facilitated Ion Diffusion for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Batteries," has been published in the internationally top-tier chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition (DOI: 10.1002/anie.1605227). Hebei University is the first corresponding affiliation of the paper, master's student Liu Na from the College of Chemistry and Materials Science is the first author, and Associate Professor Wang Liubin of Hebei University and Professor Li Fujun of Nankai University are the co-corresponding authors.
Current commercial inorganic lithium battery cathodes suffer from shortcomings such as shortages of rare metal resources, mining pollution, and low capacity. Organic electrode materials have green and abundant raw materials, but generally face problems such as dissolution in electrolyte, poor conductivity, and slow ion transport. In response to the above bottlenecks, the team used 1,4-dihydroxyanthraquinone (DHAQ) as the ligand and Cu2+ as the metal node to construct a layered Cu-DHAQ coordination polymer. Multiple advantages work synergistically to overcome the shortcomings of organic electrodes: coordination bonds restrain the organic ligands, fundamentally inhibiting the dissolution of active materials and significantly improving cycling stability; dual redox-active sites of Cu2+/Cu+ and C=O are constructed, enabling three-electron reversible lithium storage and greatly enhancing specific capacity; the layered structure has a large interlayer spacing of 0.94 nm, substantially reducing the Li+ diffusion energy barrier and delivering excellent rate performance; metal-ligand conjugation narrows the band gap, increasing the material's electrical conductivity by 6 orders of magnitude compared with pure DHAQ. The study fully elucidated the stepwise reversible lithium storage mechanism. The assembled prelithiated hard carbon||Cu-DHAQ coin cells and pouch full cells can stably drive small electronic devices such as thermo-hygrometers, demonstrating good application prospects.
This work proposes a synergistic design strategy of "dual redox sites + layered fast ion channels," providing a new approach for the development of high-performance green organic lithium battery cathodes. Since 2024, the research group has focused on metal-organic coordination energy storage electrodes and has produced a series of research results in authoritative chemistry journals such as Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Chem. Sci. (2), and ACS Energy Lett., forming a distinctive research system.
The above work was strongly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Young Top-Notch Talent Program of the Hebei Provincial Department of Education, the Multidisciplinary Interdisciplinary Research Project of Hebei University, and the Young Top-Notch Talent Program of the Institute of Life Sciences and Green Development.
Paper links:
[1] https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.1605227
[2] https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.202416392
[3] https://doi.org/10.1039/d5sc03041b
[4] https://doi.org/10.1039/d3sc05023h
[5] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c00976
