Search

With the increasing application of electric vehicles, the surging of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) may foreshadow potential environmental disruptions stemming from mishandling spent LIBs and greenhouse gas emissions from recycling. Urgent advancements are needed in the current recycling technologies for dead LIBs. Herein, we propose a solution to address the challenge of industrial LIB waste recycling by repurposing it into environmentally friendly functional materials. Specifically, unitary and ternary transition metal organic frameworks (TT-MOFs) were successfully synthesized for use in the separator for high-performance lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries. The unique ternary MOFs demonstrate the capability to mitigate the shuttle effect and enhance the adsorption and conversion of lithium polysulfides during cycling. Notably, we achieved an initial discharge capacity of 1008.7 mA h g–1at 0.5 C, with a decay rate of only 0.054% after 500 cycles. This research reuses waste solutions from the wet metallurgy process of LIB recycling and unveils a promising approach for the development of sustainable energy-storage materials in the future.

In this study, we report a high-throughput fabrication method at industrial pilot scale to produce a silver-nanoparticles-doped nanoclay–polylactic acid composite with a novel synergistic antibacterial effect. The obtained nanocomposite has a significantly lower affinity for bacterial adhesion, allowing the loading amount of silver nanoparticles to be tremendously reduced while maintaining satisfactory antibacterial efficacy at the material interface. This is a great advantage for many antibacterial applications in which cost is a consideration. Furthermore, unlike previously reported methods that require additional chemical reduction processes to produce the silver-nanoparticles-doped nanoclay, an in situ preparation method was developed in which silver nanoparticles were created simultaneously during the composite fabrication process by thermal reduction. This is the first report to show that altered material surface submicron structures created with the loading of nanoclay enables the creation of a nanocomposite with significantly lower affinity for bacterial adhesion. This study provides a promising scalable approach to produce antibacterial polymeric products with minimal changes to industry standard equipment, fabrication processes, or raw material input cost.