Abstract
The rapidly growing automobile industry increases the accumulation of end-of-life tires each year throughout the world. Waste tires lead to increased environmental issues and lasting resource problems. Recycling hazardous wastes to produce value-added products is becoming essential for the sustainable progress of society. A patented sulfonation process followed by pyrolysis at 1100 °C in a nitrogen atmosphere was used to produce carbon material from these tires and utilized as an anode in lithium-ion batteries. The combustion of the volatiles released in waste tire pyrolysis produces lower fossil CO2 emissions per unit of energy (136.51 gCO2/kW·h) compared to other conventional fossil fuels such as coal or fuel–oil, usually used in power generation. The strategy used in this research may be applied to other rechargeable batteries, supercapacitors, catalysts, and other electrochemical devices. The Raman vibrational spectra observed on these carbons show a graphitic carbon with significant disorder structure. Further, structural studies reveal a unique disordered carbon nanostructure with a higher interlayer distance of 4.5 Å compared to 3.43 Å in the commercial graphite. The carbon material derived from tires was used as an anode in lithium-ion batteries exhibited a reversible capacity of 360 mAh/g at C/3. However, the reversible capacity increased to 432 mAh/g at C/10 when this carbon particle was coated with a thin layer of carbon. A novel strategy of prelithiation applied for improving the first cycle efficiency to 94% is also presented.
Highlights
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are being used as the most promising power source for small-scale applications such as consumer portable electronics, power tools and large-scale applications such as advanced power load leveling for smart grids to meet the energy demands of modern mobile technology, electric vehicles (EVs), and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) [1]
The unique amorphous structure in soft carbons (SC) enables fast charging in LIBs even when the micron-sized particles are used, but it suffers from very low specific capacity of 250 mAh/g
hard carbons (HCs) have demonstrated the ability to store more lithium than graphite and do not exfoliate during repeated cycling in LIBs [7]. These properties make HCs a high capacity high cycle life material. It suffers from large irreversible capacity loss, which is generally attributed to the high surface area, exposed edge planes in high fraction that increase the absolute quantity of solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formed, reducing the coulombic efficiency in the first few cycles, and voltage hysteresis [8]
Summary
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are being used as the most promising power source for small-scale applications such as consumer portable electronics, power tools and large-scale applications such as advanced power load leveling for smart grids to meet the energy demands of modern mobile technology, electric vehicles (EVs), and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) [1]. The first cycle irreversible capacity loss in LIBs has been studied extensively and is attributed to the formation of a passivating SEI during the first lithiation process, due to the electrolyte reduction at the negatively polarized graphite surface and the deposition of a number of organic and inorganic compounds, trapping lithium irretrievably in the inner pores of carbon, through chemical bonding with surface functional groups or by reaction with adsorbed oxygen/water molecules [9,10,11,12,13,14].
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