General Scalable Synthesis of Mesoporous Metal Oxide Nanosheets with High Crystallinity for Ultralong-Life Li-S Batteries

Mesoporous metal oxide nanosheets (MMONs) are demonstrated great promise for various catalytic applications such as water splitting, CO2 reduction, and metal-sulfur batteries. However, limited by the conventional high-temperature synthetic routes, the prepared MMONs expose only a small portion of the effective catalytic sites, which greatly restricts their electrocatalytic activity. Herein, a facile and general glycine-assisted strategy is developed to synthesize a series of MMONs with high crystallinity and remarkable porosity. Impressively, single-phase perovskite type MMONs containing up to ten metal cations can be synthesized easily using this method without any further purification step. As a proof of concept, the Li-S cell with mesoporous LaFe0.4Co0.2Ni0.2Cu0.2O3 nanosheets as catalyst achieves superior ultralong cycling life over 1500 cycles at 2 C with only 0.041% capacity decay per cycle and a high areal capacity reaching 6.0 mAh cm-2 at a low electrolyte/sulfur ratio of 5.9 mu L mg-1. The improved performance is attributed to abundant active sites and synergistic contribution of multicomponent. This work paves a new avenue for the general synthesis of advanced MMONs and will inspire the practical applications in different fields. A facile and general glycine-assisted strategy is developed to synthesize a series of mesoporous metal oxide nanosheets (MMONs) with high crystallinity and remarkable porosity. Impressively, single-phase perovskite type MMONs containing up to ten metal cations can be synthesized easily using this method without any further purification step.image