A universal, facile and ultrafast monomer-tuned strategy to construct multi-dimensional hierarchical polymer structures and applications for lithium-ion batteries

Abstract

Hierarchical polymer architectures have attracted considerable attention owing to their crucial roles in catalysis, drug delivery, biology, electronics and energy storage fields. Unfortunately, the current synthesis of polymer particles with hierarchical structures mainly relies on templates, hydrothermal devices, surfactants, and catalysts approaches that have the disadvantages of time-consuming procedures, complex manufacturing processes, high cost, the use of toxic agents (e.g. HF acid for templates removal) and potential risk of explosion (hydrothermal methods). Herein, for the first time, we have developed an ultrafast template-free, hydrothermal-free, surfactant-free, and catalyst-free precipitation polymerization method to synthesize a diversity of polymer particles with multi-dimensional (0D, 1D, 2D and 3D) hierarchical structures simply from polymerization of common dual-aldehyde and amino monomers at room temperature, and the fabrication process only took 10 min. After carbonizing one typical polymer particles (wool-ball-like structure) as an application example, we further tested the electrochemical performance of the as-obtained typical structures and the results show a reversible lithium-ion storage capacity of 226.5 mAh g−1 after 3200 cycles at the current density of 5 A g−1. Our technique provides a cost-effective, rapid, scalable, and green approach to prepare multi-dimensional hierarchical polymer structures and paves the way towards their application in a diversity of emerging fields.