A sustainable hierarchical carbon derived from cultivated fibroid fungus for high performance lithium–sulfur batteries

Abstract

Biomass plays an important role in constructing carbon materials, but is always restricted by the non-tunable and non-standard characteristics of its precursors. In this study, we employed a new sustainable microorganism-route to synthesize the fibroid fungus that could be used as the precursor to prepare sulfur host materials for lithium sulfur batteries. The H₃PO₄-activated fibroid fungus presents a controllable nano- and micro-structure after high temperature carbonization, which can effectively suppress polysulfides dissolution and supply space for sulfur accommodation due to its high specific surface area of 509 m² g⁻¹ and pore volume of 0.69 m³ g⁻¹. As a result, the assembled lithium sulfur (Li–S) battery shows a high initial specific discharge capacity of 1319 mA h g⁻¹ at 0.1C and maintains a capacity of 663 mA h g⁻¹ after 100 cycles, corresponding to the outstanding reaction kinetics and cycling stability. Our results display an eco-friendly, renewable and controlled synthesis process of porous carbon, which features a promising application in preparing versatile electrodes in energy storage.