Significant breakthrough achieved in key technologies for black phosphorus fast-charging batteries

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According to the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the battery performance of batteries using graphite as a negative electrode material has now approached its theoretical limits. Black phosphorus (BP), while possessing an extremely high lithium storage capacity as a negative electrode material, suffers from inherent defects such as poor electrical conductivity and significant volume expansion during charging and discharging, which leads to a rapid decline in the battery’s fast-charging performance. Recently, the team led by Ma Yanwei at the institute successfully overcame this technical bottleneck. They innovatively proposed a lattice phosphorus-nitrogen (P-N) bond engineering strategy, which enabled stable charge and discharge of black phosphorus anode materials even at extremely high rates. This has opened up a completely new technical pathway for the development of next-generation energy storage devices with high energy density and high power output. Starting from the atomic scale, the research team precisely constructed P-N bonds within the lattice of the black phosphorus anode. By leveraging the weakening effect of these bonds on the covalency of adjacent P-P bonds, they induced local bond breakage during the lithiation process, thereby activating the P-P bonds and accelerating charge transfer, which significantly improved the kinetic properties of the conversion reaction. Building on these advancements, the research team successfully developed a soft-pack battery using black phosphorus as the negative electrode and lithium iron phosphate as the positive electrode, achieving an energy density of 282 watt-hours per kilogram. Under high-rate charging conditions, this battery can reach 80% of its theoretical capacity in just 10 minutes, and it remains capable of stable operation even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles, demonstrating excellent durability under fast charging conditions.