Environmental Friendly Scalable Production of Colloidal 2D Titanium Carbonitride MXene with Minimized Nanosheets Restacking for Excellent Cycle Life Lithium-Ion Batteries

Developing powerful Li-ion batteries require advanced nanostructured electrodes. Transition metal carbides or nitrides, known as MXenes, are an emerging family of two-dimensional materials. However, the lacking of an environmental-friendly preparation of colloidal MXene with few nanosheets-restacking greatly limits their usage in batteries and compromises the electrochemical performances. Here, we obtained the aqueous titanium carbonitride (Ti₃CNT_x) colloidal solution in the absence of hydrofluoric acid or organic solvents’ intercalation processes. We further suppressed the notorious nanosheets restacking issue through a freeze-drying strategy of the colloidal dispersion. The resulted Ti₃CNT_x powder, with a “fluffy” morphology and quite few percentage of restacked nanosheets, displays good charge storage capacities, high rate handling and excellent cycling performance, for example, a discharge capacity of 300 mAh g⁻¹ at 0.5 A g⁻¹ after 1000 cycles has been achieved.