Recycling water hyacinth stem waste for cost-effective production of carbon/FeOx nanocomposite anodes for sustainable fast-charging lithium-ion batteries

In this work, water hyacinth stem waste was used as a cost-effective and sustainable precursor to synthesize carbon/iron oxide (C/FeOx) nanocomposite anode materials, which were simultaneously produced in one step of catalytic graphitization. The synthesis process was superior in terms of simplicity, scalability, simplicity of required conditions, and environmental friendliness. Intensive physical characterization revealed that the synthesized materials consisted of FeOx nanoparticles and salt contents scattered across the surface of partially graphitized carbon. This was greatly advantageous since carbon would be able to suppress the volume change effect of FeOx. As a result, electrochemical studies discovered that the C/FeOx nanocomposite with the best performance delivered a high reversible capacity of 268.5 mAh g(-1) after 300 cycles at 0.1 A g(-1) and 171.1 mAh g(-1) after 1000 cycles at 2 A g(-1). Even after cycling through 5000 cycles at a fast charge stage of 10 A g(-1), this material could still function as a great anode. Also, the coulombic efficiency was found to be greater than 90% even after a long-term cycle, which demonstrated outstanding cyclic reversibility and stability achieved without any conductive additives as compared to commercial graphite. Thus, this study sheds light on the adaptive production of nanocomposite anodes from diverse biomass waste, which can be repurposed in the future to develop important sustainable energy storage applications. Also, the results indicate that these C/FeOx nanocomposite materials could be employed as low-cost anode materials in environmentally friendly lithium-ion batteries, even at fast charge-discharge rates.