Ultrafast Li-ion battery anode with superlong life and excellent cycling stability from strongly coupled ZnO nanoparticle/conductive nanocarbon skeleton hybrid materials

• We fabricated novel ZnO/C nanospheresvia a hierarchical bottom-up assembly route.
• ZnO nanograins were tightly sandwiched in the conductive nanocarbon skeleton.
• Final products can be controlled by simply adjusting the reaction temperatures.
• The unique nanostructures lead to superior capacity and excellent cycle stability.

Ultrafast rechargeable lithium-ion batteries made from low-cost and abundant electrode materials would satisfy the increasing demands for energy storage worldwide. Herein, we demonstrate a large-scale hierarchical bottom-up assembly route for the formation of lithium-ion battery anode with excellent electrochemical properties by creating composites based on embedding ZnO nanoparticles into nanocarbon matrix which uniformly dispersed on the outer and inner surfaces of a porous creased carbon bubble host, which serves to hold them tightly by the pores and creases during battery operation and sandwich them between rapid ion and electron transport pathways. We successfully increase the charging and discharging rates by nearly 300-fold over the highest rate yet reported while attaining high power density and energy density which represents the best performance for long-cycle ZnO anode so far.

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