Bridging porous Si-C composites with conducting agents for improving battery cycle life

Abstract Porous silicon–carbon (Si–C) composites have been considered to be one of the most effective architectures to improve the cycle life of Si based anode because of its native ability to accommodate the large volume change during discharge/charge process. It is found that lots of reported porous Si–C electrodes employed large amount of binder materials to enhance the structural stability which significantly decreased gravimetric capacity of the whole electrode with limited active materials. In this work, without loss of active materials, various conducting agents were used to build electrical bridges between porous Si–C composites, which significantly improved the structural stability and hence the cycle life. Due to the increase of connection possibilities, cycle life of zero-dimensional MCMB bridged electrode reaches 80 cycles with a capacity retention of 80%, and it can be further promoted to 200 cycles for the VGCF bridged electrode and 220 cycles for the rGO bridged electrode. This work paves an effective route to construct stable Si electrode with porous structures as building blocks without the decrease of active materials.