The facile mechanical stripping of black phosphorus and hybriding with graphite to improve the performance of graphite–based anode material for lithium ion battery

Black phosphorus (BP) has a high theoretical specific capacity, however, it suffer from large capacity loss and low Coulombic efficiency because of its poor conductivity and volume expansion during charging and discharging process. The hybrid of carbon materials is an effective way to solve this problem. Besides, as a bulk material, BP still needs to be exfoliated to phosphoene before use, but the commonly used liquid phase exfoliation is very difficult and inefficient, which limits its application. Herein, we used the facile mechanical shearing exfoliation technique to crush the bulk BP into fine particles at first, and then hybridized with graphite matrix and further calcined to prepare the BP–graphite (BP–G) composites. Electrochemical test results indicated that the BP–G composites showed a better electrochemical performance than pure graphite, but the content of black phosphorus in the composites is not the higher the better, the BP–G composite with 10 % BP (BP0.1–G) exhibited the best performance, which had a reversible specific capacity of 515.6 mAh g−1 in the first cycle and 473.6 mAh g−1 at 100th cycles, the capacity retention was up to 91.9 %. The applied mechanical stripping technique for bulk BP in this paper has the advantages of simple operation and high efficiency, and the synthesized BP–G composite possess high specific capacity and Coulombic efficiency, hence exhibiting a good application prospect.