  In the quest to increase battery performance, nanostructuring battery
electrodes gives access to architectures with electrical conductivity and
solid-state diffusion regimes not accessible with traditional electrodes based
on aggregated spherical microparticles, while often also contributing to the
cyclability of otherwise unstable active materials. This work describes
electrodes where active material and current collector are formed as a single
nanostructured composite network, consisting of macroscopic fabrics of carbon
nanotube fibers covered with conformal MoS2 grown preferentially aligned over
the graphitic layers, without metallic current collector or any conductive or
polymeric additives. The composite fabric of CNTF/MoS2 retain high toughness
and show out-of-plane electrical conductivity as high as 1.2 S/m, above the
threshold to avoid electrical transport-limited performance of electrodes (1
S/m), and above control nanocomposite LIB electrodes (0.1 S/m) produced from
dispersed nanocarbons. Cycled against Li, they show specific capacity as high
as 0.7 Ah/g along with appreciable rate capability and cycling stability in low
(108% capacity retention after 50 cycles at 0.1 A/g) as well as high current
density (89 % capacity retention after 250 cycles at 1 A/g). The composite
fabrics are flexible, with high tensile toughness up to 0.7 J/g, over two
orders of magnitude higher than conventional electrodes or regular MoS2
material, and full-electrode capacity above state of the art at different
current densities.
