Lithiophilic NiO Nanoparticles Embedded in Porous Carbon Nanosheet Arrays on Commercial Nickel Foam Hosts for Dendrite-Free Li Metal Anodes

MOF-derived NiO embedded porous carbon nanosheet arrays (NiO-C) have been successfully coated on the inside surfaces of commercial nickel foam frameworks (NiO-C@NF) as highly lithiophilic and stable hosts for Li composite anodes. It is demonstrated that the lithiophilic nature of embedded NiO and the adsorption effect of porous carbon nanosheet arrays could synergistically endow the NiO-C@NF hosts with excellent Li wettability, resulting in the fast impregnation of molten Li to obtain the NiO-C@NF/Li composite anodes. Moreover, the porous, conductive, and lithiophilic NiO-C nanosheet arrays of NiO-C@NF hosts could effectively buffer the volume variation, lower the local current density, and reduce the Li nucleation barrier during charging and discharging processes, thus prohibiting the uncontrollable formation of Li dendrites. As a consequence, the NiO-C@NF/Li composite anodes exhibit uniform Li stripping/plating morphologies and long cycling lifespan over 1000 h with extremely small overpotential of ∼26 mV in symmetric cells at the areal current density of 3 mA cm–2. Furthermore, when coupled with sulfur, LiFePO4, and LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 cathodes in coin-type full cells, the NiO-C@NF/Li composite anodes also exhibit excellent cycling stability and rate performances, suggesting their promising prospects for energy-storage application.