Multifunctional Hyphae Carbon Powering Lithium Sulfur Batteries.

Biotechnology can bring new breakthrough on design and fabrication of energy materials and devices. In this work, for the first time, we propose a novel and facile biological self-assembly technology to fabricate multifunctional Rhizopus hyphae carbon fibre (RHCF) and its derivatives in large scale for electrochemical energy storage. Crosslinked hollow carbon fibres are successfully prepared by conversion of Rhizopus hyphae, and we further realize macroscopic production of centimeter-level carbon balls consisting of hollow RHCFs. Moreover, the self-assembled RHCF balls show strong adsorption characteristics on metal ions and can be converted into a series of derivatives such as RHCF/metal oxides. Notably, the designed RHCF derivatives are demonstrated with powerful multifunctionability as cathode, anode and separator for lithium sulfur batteries (LSBs). The RHCF can act as the host material to combine with metal oxide (CoO) and S, Li metal and polypropylene (PP) separator to form new RHCF/CoO-S cathode, RHCF/Li anode and RHCF/PP separator, respectively. Consequently, the optimized LSBs full cell presents excellent cycling performance and superior high-rate capacity (881.3 mA h g-1 at 1 C). Our work provides a new method for large-scale preparation of hollow carbon fibres and derivatives for advanced energy storage and conversion. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.