A Laterally Extended Perylene Hexacarboxylate via Diels-Alder Reaction for High-Performance Organic Lithium-Ion Batteries

•Diels-Alder reaction is an efficient strategy to incorporate more redox groups into and extend π systems in one-step.•Diels-Alder reaction is anticipated to be an efficient approach to achieve high-performance organic electrode materials.•A laterally extended perylene hexacarboxylate via Diels-Alder reaction has been design as a proof-of-concept example.•The electrochemical studies indicated it indeed possess a higher specific capacity and more stable cycling performance.•This finding is of considerable realistic significance for the high-performance organic electrode materials.

The Diels-Alder reaction is a well-known [4 + 2] cycloaddition in organic chemistry, which is employed in this article as an efficient approach towards high-performance organic electrode materials since it can achieve the incorporation of more redox groups and extension of π systems in one step. As a proof-of-concept example, we reported that a hexalithium benzo[ghi]perylene hexacarboxylate (Li6-BPHC) by the lateral extension of well-known organic anode material, tetralithium perylene tetracarboxylate (Li4-PTC), via a facile Diels-Alder reaction, which has been demonstrated to not only store nearly six electrons per molecule at a current density of 280 mA g−1 but also possess a highly stable cycling performance over 100 cycles.

Graphical abstractThe lateral extension of the well-known tetralithium perylene tetracarboxylate leads to perylene hexacarboxylate (Li6-BPHC, see TOC) via a facile Diels-Alder reaction, which possesses an enhanced performance for organic lithium-ion batteries.Download high-res image (149KB)Download full-size image