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Currently, development of metal sulfide anodes for sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) with high capacity, fast charging/discharging, and good cycling performance continues to present a great challenge. He...

Currently, development of metal sulfide anodes for sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) with high capacity, fast charging/discharging, and good cycling performance continues to present a great challenge. Hence, a topochemical conversion strategy is reported to fabricate 2D ultrathin GeS

Solar-driven overall water splitting is highly desirable for hydrogen generation with sustainable energy sources, which need efficient, earth-abundant, robust, and bifunctional electrocatalysts for both oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Herein, we propose a heterogeneous bimetallic phosphide/sulfide nanocomposite electrocatalyst of NiFeSP on nickel foam (NiFeSP/NF), which shows superior electrocatalytic activity of low overpotentials of 91 mV at -10 mA cm-2 for HER and of 240 mV at 50 mA cm-2 for OER in 1 M KOH solution. In addition, the NiFeSP/NF presents excellent overall water splitting performance with a cell voltage as low as 1.58 V at a current density of 10 mA cm-2. Combining with a photovoltaic device of a Si solar cell or integrating into photoelectrochemical (PEC) systems, the bifunctional NiFeSP/NF electrocatalyst implements unassisted solar-driven water splitting with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of ∼9.2% and significantly enhanced PEC performance, respectively.

Phase transitions and phase engineering in two-dimensional MoS2 are important for applications in electronics and energy storage. By in situ transmission electron microscopy, we find that H-MoS2 transforms to T-LiMoS2 at the early stages of lithiation followed by the formation of Mo and Li2S phases. The transition from H-MoS2 to T-LiMoS2 is explained in terms of electron doping and electron-phonon coupling at the conduction band minima. Both are essential for the development of two-dimensional semiconductor-metal contacts based on MoS2 and the usage of MoS2 as anode material in Li ion batteries.

In the present work, taking advantage of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy, we show that the dynamic lithiation process of anode materials can be revealed in an unprecedented resolution. Atomically resolved imaging of the lithiation process in SnO2 nanowires illustrated that the movement, reaction, and generation of b = [1[overline]1[overline]1] mixed dislocations leading the lithiated stripes effectively facilitated lithium-ion insertion into the crystalline interior. The geometric phase analysis and density functional theory simulations indicated that lithium ions initial preference to diffuse along the [001] direction in the {200} planes of SnO2 nanowires introduced the lattice expansion and such dislocation behaviors. At the later stages of lithiation, the Li-induced amorphization of rutile SnO2 and the formation of crystalline Sn and LixSn particles in the Li2O matrix were observed.