Hydrothermal synthesis and electrochemical performance evaluation of nitrogen and boron co-doped reduced graphene oxide as an efficient anode material for lithium-ion battery

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Development of new materials for increasing capacity and performance of the lithium-ion batteries has been the goal of the designers for some time. Systematic investigations on N B co-doped reduced graphene oxide (N-B-rGO) synthesised via ammonia and boric acid-assisted hydrothermal method remains scarce, particularly its doping configuration‑lithium storage structure-activity relationship. This work addresses this gap by developing N-B-rGO as a high-performance lithium-ion battery (LIB) anode material. FTIR spectroscopy and FESEM-EDS verified that nitrogen and boron species were introduced into the graphene framework. As an LIB anode, the material exhibits significant improvements over as-received GO. N-B-rGO delivers specific capacity of 580 mAhg −1 at 0.1Ag −1 , higher than that of GO (390 mAhg −1 ). At current densities of 0.2, 0.5, 0.8, and 1.0 Ag −1 , the material maintains reversible capacities of 540, 450, 400 and 365 mAhg −1 , respectively. Even at 5 Ag −1 , N-B-rGO retains 183 mAhg −1 versus only 20 mAhg −1 for GO, and recovers to 550 mAhg −1 when tested again at 0.1 Ag −1 . Cyclic stability tests at 5 Ag −1 reveal N-B-rGO maintains 170–190 mAhg −1 for over 400 cycles with over 95% capacity retention and maintaining nearly 100% Coulombic efficiency, substantially outperforming GO's 28–30 mAhg −1 with 80–85% retention after just 200 cycles.