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Prospects of organic electrode materials for practical lithium batteries

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 4, pages 127–142 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Organic materials have attracted much attention for their utility as lithium-battery electrodes because their tunable structures can be sustainably prepared from abundant precursors in an environmentally friendly manner. Most research into organic electrodes has focused on the material level instead of evaluating performance in practical batteries. This Review addresses this by first providing an overview of the history and redox of organic electrode materials and then evaluating the prospects and remaining challenges of organic electrode materials for practical lithium batteries. Our evaluations are made according to energy density, power density, cycle life, gravimetric density, electronic conductivity and other relevant parameters, such as energy efficiency, cost and resource availability. We posit that research in this field must focus more on the intrinsic electronic conductivity and density of organic electrode materials, after which a comprehensive optimization of full batteries should be performed under practically relevant conditions. We hope to stimulate high-quality applied research that might see the future commercialization of organic electrode materials.

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Fig. 1: The development of organic electrode materials for batteries.
Fig. 2: Representative organic electrode materials for Li batteries.
Fig. 3: Configurations and key parameters for organic electrode materials in Li batteries.
Fig. 4: Energy density, power density and cycle life of selected organic and inorganic electrode materials in Li batteries.
Fig. 5: Gravimetric density and electronic conductivity of selected organic and inorganic electrode materials.
Fig. 6: Performance and cost estimation of Li batteries with selected organic and inorganic electrode materials.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Programs for Nano-Key Project (2017YFA0206700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21835004) and the 111 Project from the Ministry of Education of China (B12015).

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  1. Key Laboratory of Advanced Energy Materials Chemistry (Ministry of Education), Renewable Energy Conversion and Storage Center (RECAST), College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

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J.C. proposed the topic of the Review. Y.L. conducted the literature search. J.C. and Y.L. discussed, wrote and revised the manuscript.

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Lu, Y., Chen, J. Prospects of organic electrode materials for practical lithium batteries. Nat Rev Chem 4, 127–142 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-020-0160-9

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