Strategy for Boosting Li-Ion Current in Silicon Nanoparticles

Improvement in the rate capability needs to be addressed for utilization of a Si anode in high-power Li-ion batteries. Regarding the rate capability, its improvement by Si–C nanocomposites seems to be somewhat saturated, thus indicating that the other method should be tried for further enhancement of the rate capability. Here, we introduce Si nanoparticles uniformly coated with nanometer-thick polyacrylonitrile (PAN) with better wettability to liquid electrolytes and minimizing electronic resistance, which might result from a thick PAN coating: the effective contact surface area made by the contact of Si nanoparticles and liquid electrolyte is increased for larger Li-ion current, leading to ultrafast rate capability retaining 62% of the 0.2C rate discharge capacity at 100C. In addition, a strong adhesive property of PAN provides highly mechanically robust Si anodes for multielectrode-stacked flexible lithium-ion batteries, which show no physical damage after 30 000 bending cycles with a bending radius of 25 mm.