Flexible 3D porous MXene foam for high-performance lithium-ion batteries --- Small, 2019, 15, 1904293.

Qian Zhao, Qizhen Zhu, Jiawei Miao, Peng Zhang, Pengbo Wan, Lingzhang He, Bin Xu*

    2D transition-metal carbides and nitrides, named MXenes, are promising materials for energy storage, but suffer from aggregation and restacking of the 2D nanosheets, which limits their electrochemical performance. In order to overcome this problem and realize the full potential of MXene nanosheets, a 3D MXene foam with developed porous structure is established via a simple sulfur-template method, which is freestanding, flexible, and highly conductive, and can be directly used as the electrode in lithiumion batteries. The 3D porous architecture of the MXene foam offers massive active sites to enhance the lithium storage capacity. Moreover, its foam structure facilitates electrolyte infiltration for fast Li+ transfer. As a result, this flexible 3D porous MXene foam exhibits significantly enhanced capacity of 455.5 mAh g^-1 at 50 mA g^-1, excellent rate performance (101 mAh g^-1 at 18 A g^-1), and superior ultralong-term cycle stability (220 mAh g^-1 at 1 A g^-1 after 3500 cycles). This work not only demonstrates the great superiority of the 3D porous MXene foam but also proposes the sulfur-template method for controllable constructing of the 3D foam from 2D nanosheets at a relatively low temperature.