Environmental Friendly Scalable Production of Colloidal 2D Titanium Carbonitride MXene with Minimized Nanosheets Restacking for Excellent Cycle Life Lithium-Ion Batteries

- Colloidal Ti3CNTx MXene was prepared in the absence of HF or organics intercalation.
- The restacking of delaminated Ti3CNTx flakes was greatly suppressed by freeze-drying.
- The freeze-dried Ti3CNTx shows developed ion diffusion paths with abundant voids.
- The capacity of freeze-dried Ti3CNTx reaches 300 mAh/g at 0.5 A/g after 1000 cycles.
- The delamination/freeze-drying process for MXene is facile, scalable, and general.

Developing powerful Li-ion batteries require advanced nanostructured electrodes. Transition metal carbides or nitrides, known as MXenes, are an emerging family of two-dimensional materials. However, the lacking of an environmental-friendly preparation of colloidal MXene with few nanosheets-restacking greatly limits their usage in batteries and compromises the electrochemical performances. Here, we obtained the aqueous titanium carbonitride (Ti3CNTx) colloidal solution in the absence of hydrofluoric acid or organic solvents' intercalation processes. We further suppressed the notorious nanosheets restacking issue through a freeze-drying strategy of the colloidal dispersion. The resulted Ti3CNTx powder, with a “fluffy” morphology and quite few percentage of restacked nanosheets, displays good charge storage capacities, high rate handling and excellent cycling performance, for example, a discharge capacity of 300 mAh g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 after 1000 cycles has been achieved.

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