It will be concluded in this blog about the previous development of advanced materials for Lithium Batteries(LIBs). Among which most of the points are from a latest review paper "Function materials for rechargeable batteries, Adv. Mater, 2011, 23, 1695-1715".
The schematic of previous study concerning electrode materials is showed below:
From the side of Cathode materials, Lithium metal oxides are commonly used to act as the provider of Li-ion in the charging procedure. The potential capacity of this cathode materials is competitive but a poor ability of capacity retention remains a big problem. The polyanionic based materials are regarded as the next generation materials for Cathode due to its safety and reversibility of Lithium storage. This category could be represented by LiFePO4. Latest research indicates that the nanosize effect plays a great role in the contribution of extremely high performance, which would be a hot point in the future research. There are also organic materials which has also attracted a lot attentions, but will not described in details here.
When comes to the materials for anode, lithium alloys (mainly with main-group elements)show great potential capacity due to its reaction with Lithium. However, the great volume expansion during the reactions could never be neglected. Hollow nanostructures could reduce the inner strain due to the volume variation. For instance, Ag coated 3D porous silicon has been developed to reduce the effect of volume expansion, which could be illustrated by the figure below:
What's more, carbon coating of the tin based materials will decrease the volume expansion in a large extend.Another kind of anode materials—Transition metal oxides also attract similar considerations in a similar way.
Such combination of two kinds of materials will take advantage of the characteristics of two or more kinds of materials, which represent the trend of developing novel anode materials.