The design of novel and high-performance binder systems is an efficient strategy to resolve the issues caused by huge volume changes of high-capacity anodes. Herein, we develop a novel water-soluble bifunctional binder composed of a conductive polythiophene polymer (PED) and high-adhesive polyacrylic acid (PAA) with abundant polar groups. Compared with conventional conductive additives, the flexible conductive polymer can solve the insufficient electrical contact between active materials and the conductive agent, thus providing the integral conductive network, which is extremely important for stable electrochemical performance. Additionally, the polar groups of this composite binder can form double H-bond interactions with the hydroxyl groups of SiO₂ layers onto the silicon surface, keeping an integral electrode structure, which can decrease the continuous formation of SEI films during the repeated cycles. Benefiting from these bifunctional advantages, the Si electrodes with the composite binder delivered a high reversible capacity of 2341 mAh g⁻¹ at 1260 mA g⁻¹, good cycle stability with 88.8% retention of the initial reversible capacity over 100 cycles, and high-rate capacity (1150 mAh g⁻¹ at 4200 mA g⁻¹). This work opens up a new venture to develop multifunctional binders to enable the stable operation of high-capacity anodes for high-energy batteries.

High energy density batteries with high performance are significantly important for intelligent electrical vehicular systems. Iron sulfurs are recognized as one of the most promising anodes for high energy density lithium-ion batteries because of their high theoretical specific capacity and relatively stable electrochemical performance. However, their large-scale commercialized application for lithium-ion batteries are plagued by high-cost and complicated preparation methods. Here, we report a simple and cost-effective method for the scalable synthesis of nanoconfined FeS in porous carbon (defined as FeS@C) as anodes by direct pyrolysis of an iron(III) p-toluenesulfonate precursor. The carbon architecture embedded with FeS nanoparticles provides a rapid electron transport property, and its hierarchical porous structure effectively enhances the ion transport rate, thereby leading to a good electrochemical performance. The resultant FeS@C anodes exhibit high reversible capacity and long cycle life up to 500 cycles at high current density. This work provides a simple strategy for the mass production of FeS@C particles, which represents a critical step forward toward practical applications of iron sulfurs anodes.

To address the challenges of manual inspection dependency, low efficiency, and high costs in evaluating the surface grinding quality of composite materials, this study investigated machine vision-based surface recognition algorithms. We proposed a multi-scale texture fusion analysis algorithm that innovatively integrated luminance analysis with multi-scale texture features through decision-level fusion. Specifically, a modified Rayleigh parameter was developed during luminance analysis to rapidly pre-segment unpolished areas by characterizing surface reflection properties. Furthermore, we enhanced the traditional Otsu algorithm by incorporating global grayscale mean (μ) and standard deviation (σ), overcoming its inherent limitations of exclusive reliance on grayscale histograms and lack of multimodal feature integration. This optimization enables simultaneous detection of specular reflection defects and texture uniformity variations. To improve detection window adaptability across heterogeneous surface regions, we designed a multi-scale texture analysis framework operating at multiple resolutions. Through decision-level fusion of luminance analysis and multi-scale texture evaluation, the proposed algorithm achieved 96% recognition accuracy with >95% reliability, demonstrating robust performance for automated surface grinding quality assessment of composite materials.