Porous graphene prepared from anthracite as high performance anode materials for lithium-ion battery applications

Porous graphene has attracted considerable attention for its promising potential application in energy storage devices due to its unique porous structure combined with inherent electronic characteristics of graphene. Herein, a cost effective and environmentally friendly strategy is developed to prepare porous graphene via graphitization coupled with liquid oxidation-rapid thermal reduction using anthracite as a precursor. The prepared porous graphene has microstructure features such as highly continuous corrugated nanosheets with micro-meso-macro hierarchical porous structure, high specific surface area (640 m2 g−1) and large pore volume (3.792 cm3 g−1) with large amount of structural defects and nanopores, which provides sufficient active sites for lithium ions storage and offers favorable pathways for the fast transportation of lithium ions and electrons. When used as anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, such porous graphene exhibits a high reversible capacity of 770 mAh·g−1 at current density of 0.1 C, and possesses an outstanding rate capability with desirable capacities of 274 mAh·g−1 and 224 mAh·g−1 even at high current densities of 10 C and 20 C. Moreover, such porous graphene also demonstrates superior cycling performance up to 98.0% of the initial reversible capacity retention after 110 cycles. This study paves a promising approach to the large-scale production of porous graphene from coal for high performance anode materials used in lithium-ion batteries. •Anthracite is used as starting precursor to prepare coal-based porous graphene (CPG).•CPG has continuous highly corrugated nanosheets with hierarchical porous structure.•Such prepared CPG possesses high specific surface area and large pore volume.•LIBs based on CPG anode materials show superior electrochemical performances.