An acid-pasting approach towards perylenetetracarboxylic diimide based lithium/sodium ion battery cathodes with high rate performances.

Graphical abstract Obtained by a solution-based acid-pasting approach, the composite of perylene diimide and carbon black (PTCDI/CB) exhibits excellent electrochemical performances as the organic cathode material in both lithium and sodium ion batteries. Abstract An acid-pasting approach is developed in this work to fabricate the composite of perylenetetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI) and carbon black in concentrated sulfuric acid. Different from traditional mechanical mixing, the solution-based fabrication strategy enables the sufficient blending of PTCDI as active component and carbon black as conductive agent in the PTCDI/CB composite. Serving as the cathode material, the PTCDI/CB composite shows excellent electrochemical performances in both lithium ion battery (137 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 and 110 mAh g−1 at 2000 mA g−1) and sodium ion battery (134 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 and 99 mAh g−1 at 1000 mA g−1), which are comparable to the state-of-art organic/inorganic cathode materials. Considering the simplicity of the processing procedures and the low cost of the starting materials, the acid-pasting approach is a highly attractive method for the solution-based manufacturing of organic secondary battery electrodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]