Organic Electrodes With Excellent Rate Capability and Cycling Stability Enabled by Assembling Active Materials onto Conductive Agents

ABSTRACT Organic redox compounds represent a class of alternative electrode materials for lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) that are free of transition metals and completely biodegradable, with high molecular tunability, environmental benignity, and economic affordability. However, to realize this promise in practical devices, organic electrode materials (OEMs) must overcome low rate capability and poor cycling stability stemming from their intrinsically low electronic conductivity and pronounced solubility in organic solvents. Herein, we demonstrate an integrated strategy of embedding OEMs within conductive networks to simultaneously resolve these challenges. Using lithium terephthalate (LTP) as a model system, we assembled it on the conductive agent Super P (SP), the resulting composite delivers an impressive capacity of 104 mAh g −1 at a demanding 5C rate and retains 130 mAh g −1 after 1000 cycles at 1C, significantly outperforming its physically mixed counterpart, which delivers merely 25 mAh g −1 at 5C and rapidly fades to 56 mAh g −1 under identical cycling conditions. These exceptional electrochemical properties originate from the intimate interaction between the active LTP and the conductive SP network, which not only creates robust electronic pathways to access the potential capacities but also effectively prevents LTP dissolution in electrolytes during prolonged cycling.