A Porous Silicon Anode Material Prepared By Chemical Etching for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have played a critical role in the development of portable electronics and have gained a great deal of attention as power sources for emerging applications such as wearable devices, electric vehicles and robots. However, current LIBs reached technological limits for increasing their energy densities. In order to solve this, much research effort has been devoted to finding high capacity electrode materials to replace currently used materials such as graphite anode in LIBs. Although silicon-based materials are regarded as one of the most promising candidates for anodes because of their huge capacities, the huge volume expansion/contraction of Si during cycling lead to drastic capacity degradation. Recently, porous silicon materials have been revealed to accommodate the large volume change of Si, thus showing outstanding electrochemical performances. However, their use in LIBs suffers from the complicated and limited routes for their synthesis. In this presentation, we represent a porous Si material prepared by scalable and nontoxic chemical etching process as a high capacity lithium storage material for LIBs. This material synthesis concept presented herein represents a means of improving the electrochemical properties of porous Si anode materials for use in commercial LIBs.