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Facile Synthesis of Hollow Mesoporous NiCo2O4 Nanostructures and Their Structural Evolution By Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction As a Negative Electrode in Lithium-Ion Batteries

Tuesday, 21 June 2016
Riverside Center (Hyatt Regency)
J. Yoo, N. Venugopal, S. Son, W. Oh, G. H. Lew, K. Palanisamy, Y. Kim, and W. S. Yoon (Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University)
Mesoporous hollow nanostructures have been attracting remarkable attention because of their high surface area, robust structure and are indispensably have a great scope for basic studies. On the other side, binary metal oxides are considered to be as promising anode materials for lithium ion batteries, especially, NiCo2O4 is of a great virtue to overcome the current existing hurdles with anode materials, such as reversible capacity, structural stability, and electronic conductivity. Also, the reduction of high-cost and toxic metal, Co content in the NiCo2O4 in comparison with pure Co3O4 makes it more significant for mainstream applications. Herein we report a facile chemical synthesis method followed by thermal annealing in the air to attain three-dimensional (3D) arrangement of mesoporous NiCo2O4 hollow nanoparticles that are randomly organized into bundles of superstructures. This method can produce highly reproducible structures with gram quantities. Brunauer−Emmett−Teller (BET), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations reveal that the surface area of the synthesized materials is determined to be 134 m2 g-1(narrow pore size distribution of 3-4 nm) with a unique porous morphology including nanoparticles/ flakes of about 5 to 50 nm in size range appeared on the surface of each hollow particle exert significant influence on the electrochemical performance. It is evidently exhibited by NiCo2O4 hollow superstructures electrode that the increase in lithium storage capacity and excellent cycling stability (1335 mA h g−1 at a current density of 100 mA g−1 after 30 cycles). Further, we have investigated the structural evolution of this new morphological electrode material by ex-situ X-ray diffraction using synchrotron X-ray beam during first and second consequent cycles tested at low scan rate (100 mA g−1). Moreover, this synthesis strategy can be extended to the preparation of other metal oxides for energy storage devices and for many other related applications.