Microstructual and Chemical Analysis of Surface Treated Metal Foam Anode for Li Rechargeable Battery

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As the amount of power consumed by electronic products increases, a lot of studies focused on high capacity and miniaturization of batteries. In order to overcome the low capacity of carbon anode in Li rechargeable battery, researches on the development of high capacity anode material have been conducted. In particularly, it has been reported that pure lithium was adopted for high capacity of Li ion battery due to its light in weight and excellent theoretical capacity. However, when pure lithium is used, the capacity decreases rapidly as charging and discharging proceeded, which is reported to be formation of dendrite on the Li surface during charging/discharging. In order to suppress the growth of dendrite during charging/discharging, several researches have been focused on the Li impregnated metal foam for Li rechargeable battery. However, due to the poor wettability between metal foam and pure Li, adhesive materials had to be deposited by using expensive processes such as chemical vapor deposition to impregnate the Li into metal foam. In this study we focus on the heat treatment effect on the microstructure and Li-impregnation property of Ni metal foam. We oxidized the metal foam in a high temperature(500-900oC) for 5 min using the furnace to improve the wettability between the Lithium and Ni metal foam. Heat treated metal foam was dip into melted Li at 400 oC in a glove box. As a result, the rate of Li-impregnation in the heat treated metal foam was more than 10 times faster than that of the untreated Ni metal foam. The surface of heat treated Ni metal foam was characterized using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) equipped with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy(EDS). Figure. 1 shows the TEM image of the untreated and heat treated Ni metal foam surface. It reveals that an additional layer having a thickness of 200 nm was observed in the heat treated Ni foam. The additional layer was identified as polycrystalline NiOx by EDS and selected area diffraction pattern (SADP). It is believed that formation of NiOx was greatly contribute to improvement of the impregnation characteristics. In addition, the impregnation characteristics of Ni alloy foam will be discussed in this presentation. Figure 1