Synergistic Engineering of Ni-Decorated Composite Current Collector and Hollow CoS Nanocages for Ultrahigh Areal Capacity Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes

Electrode materials based on transition metal oxides and sulfides hold great promise for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), yet their practical application is significantly hindered by severe volume expansion, structural collapse during cycling, and limited areal capacity. To address these issues, we propose a synergistic engineering strategy that integrates a hollow CoS nanocage structure with a highly conductive 3D composite current collector. Specifically, a flexible carbon cloth (CC) is modified via electrodeposition of a metallic Ni layer (CC/Ni), offering enhanced electron transport pathways and robust mechanical support. Simultaneously, a metal–organic framework (ZIF-67) is employed as a sacrificial template to construct hierarchically porous CoS hollow nanocages (CoS HNC) through in situ liquid-phase sulfidation. The resulting CoS HNC@CC/Ni electrode combines hierarchical ion diffusion channels and continuous conductive networks, enabling rapid ion/electron transport and mitigating volume expansion during cycling. This synergistic architecture endows the electrode with an ultrahigh areal capacity of 3.81 mAh cm^–2 at 1 mA cm^–2 after 240 cycles and excellent rate performance (1.42 mAh cm^–2 at 8 mA cm^–2), offering a promising design blueprint for constructing high-performance, high-areal-capacity anodes for next-generation lithium-ion batteries.