High capacity silicon anodes enabled by MXene viscous aqueous ink

The ever-increasing demands for advanced lithium-ion batteries have greatly stimulated the quest for robust electrodes with a high areal capacity. Producing thick electrodes from a high-performance active material would maximize this parameter. However, above a critical thickness, solution-processed films typically encounter electrical/mechanical problems, limiting the achievable areal capacity and rate performance as a result. Herein, we show that two-dimensional titanium carbide or carbonitride nanosheets, known as MXenes, can be used as a conductive binder for silicon electrodes produced by a simple and scalable slurry-casting technique without the need of any other additives. The nanosheets form a continuous metallic network, enable fast charge transport and provide good mechanical reinforcement for the thick electrode (up to 450 µm). Consequently, very high areal capacity anodes (up to 23.3 mAh cm−2) have been demonstrated

Capacitive Deionization -- defining a class of desalination technologies

Over the past decade, capacitive deionization (CDI) has realized a surge inattention in the field of water desalination and can now be considered as animportant technology class, along with reverse osmosis and electrodialysis.While many of the recently developed technologies no longer use a mechanismthat follows the strict definition of the term "capacitive", these methodsnevertheless share many common elements that encourage treating them withsimilar metrics and analyses. Specifically, they all involve electricallydriven removal of ions from a feed stream, storage in an electrode (i.e., ionelectrosorption) and release, in charge/discharge cycles. Grouping all thesemethods in the technology class of CDI makes it possible to treat evolving newtechnologies in standardized terms and compare them to other technologies inthe same class