Morphology-controlled synthesis and lithium storage properties of SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with petaloid and granular MoS2 nanosheets as the external layer in different solvents

Abstract We develop a novel method to design two kinds of SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres in different solvents of (NH4)2MoS4 solution. SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with petaloid and granular MoS2 nanosheets as the external layer are rationally tailored by adjusting different solvents (water and N, N-Dimethylformamide). These two kinds of SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres exhibit outstanding lithium storage properties for their reasonable nanocomponent-selection and rational structure-design. SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with petaloid/granular MoS2 nanosheets yield the high reversible capacity of 1082/870 mAh g−1 at 0.1 A g−1 after 200 cycles and the capacity of 744/480 mAh g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 after 500 cycles, respectively. Notably, the large and fluffy MoS2 nanosheets in SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with petaloid MoS2 nanosheets are not easy to exfoliate during deep cycles and can enable the nanocomposites to have better contact with electrolyte, thus they have better integrity of hollow structures after deep cycles than SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with granular MoS2 nanosheets, resulting in optimized properties of SnO2@C@MoS2 hollow nanospheres with petaloid MoS2 nanosheets. This work sheds light on the morphology-controlled synthesis and performance optimization of other energy storage nanomaterials for high-performance.