A facile strategy to prepare NiCoP nanoparticles wrapped in nitrogen doped porous carbon spheres for high-performance lithium-ion battery

In this work, we propose a facile and one-step strategy to synthesize NiCoP nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in nitrogen doped porous carbon spheres (NiCoP@N-PCS) by direct carbonating a bimetal-organophosphine framework. In application to Lithium ions battery, the NiCoP NPs enables to promote the redox reaction while the N-PCS acts as buffer layer to alleviate the volume changes in the charge/discharge process. On the other hand, the novel nanostructure provides abundant tunnels for Li⁺ diffusion. As a result, the NiCoP@N-PCS exhibits a highly reversible specific capacity of ～588.3 mAh∙g⁻¹ after 100 cycles at 0.1 A·g⁻¹ and excellent rate performance (280 mAh∙g⁻¹ at 2.0 A·g⁻¹).