Abstract
Silicon has emerged as the most promising high-capacity material for lithium-ion batteries. Waste glass can be a potential low cost and environmentally benign silica resource enabling production of nanosized silicon at the industry level. Windshields are generally made of laminated glass comprising two separate glass bonded together with a layer of polyvinyl butyral sandwiched between them. Herein, silicon/carbon nanocomposites are fabricated from windshields for the first time via magnesiothermic reduction and facile carbonization process using both waste glass and polyvinyl butyral as silica and carbon sources, respectively. High purity reduced silicon has unique 3-dimensional nanostructure with large surface area. Furthermore, the incorporation of carbon in silicon enable to retain the composite anodes highly conductive and mechanically robust, thus providing enhanced cycle stability.
Highlights
Silicon has emerged as the most promising high-capacity material for lithium-ion batteries
There are some challenges for the commercial utilization of silicon anodes, including the large volume expansion, structural collapse, and unstable solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer during the alloying process
The change in crystal structure is investigated based on the X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns of waste glass (WG), reduced WG (R-WG) and reduced Si (R-Si) (Fig. 2)
Summary
Silicon has emerged as the most promising high-capacity material for lithium-ion batteries. Silicon/carbon nanocomposites are fabricated from windshields for the first time via magnesiothermic reduction and facile carbonization process using both waste glass and polyvinyl butyral as silica and carbon sources, respectively. There are some challenges for the commercial utilization of silicon anodes, including the large volume expansion, structural collapse, and unstable solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer during the alloying process These phenomena result in capacity decrease, poor Coulombic efficiency, and poor cycling retention[10,11]. When considering the cost and environmental friendliness, some researchers have suggested using industrial waste or organic matter in nature such as rice husks and petrochemical waste as silicon sources instead of chemical precursors[16,17,18,19] These eco-friendly precursors can reduce the precursor cost; the reduction of silica is a high-energy and high-cost process. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first synthesis of a silicon/carbon composite anode for LIBs using waste windshields as both silicon and carbon precursors
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