Nickel salicylaldoxime-based coordination polymer as a cathode for lithium-ion batteries

Conjugated coordination polymers attract attention as materials for electrochemical energy storage, mostly as cathode materials for supercapacitors. Faradaic capacity may be introduced to such materials using redox-active building blocks, metals, or ligands. Using this strategy, a novel hybrid cathode material was developed based on a Ni²⁺ metal-organic polymer. The proposed material, in addition to double-layer capacitance, shows high pseudocapacitance, which arises from the contributions of both the metal center and ligand. A tailoring strategy in the ligand design allows us to minimize the molecular weight of the ligand, which increases its gravimetric energy. According to computational results, the ligand makes the prevailing contribution to the pseudocapacitance of the material. Different approaches to metal–organic polymer (MOP) synthesis were implemented, and the obtained materials were examined by FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, powder XRD, SEM/EDX (energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), TEM, and thermal analysis. Energy-storage performance was comparatively studied with cyclic voltammetry (CV) and galvanostatic charge–discharge (GCD). As a result, materials with an excellent discharge capacity were obtained, reaching the gravimetric energy density of common inorganic cathode materials.