Porous NiO materials prepared by solid-state thermolysis of a Ni-MOF crystal for lithium-ion battery anode

Abstract

We report here a facile solid-state thermolysis route for the large-scale synthesis of NiO nano/micro materials from a nickel ion-based metal–organic framework (MOF). First, nickel ion-based MOF was synthesized via a solvothermal method by using p-benzene-dicarboxylic acid (p-H2bdc) as ligand. Second, porous NiO nano/micro materials were prepared from MOF precursor via a simple calcination procedure. The effects of calcination temperature and time on the structure and morphology of decomposed products were investigated by XRD, FESEM and TEM. When used as anode materials for LIBs, the porous NiO electrode exhibited a high capacity of about 400 mAh g−1 and retained slightly reduced capacity after 100 cycles at a rate of 0.1 C. Importantly, the present solid-state thermolysis approach is facile, reproducible and scalable, which could be easily extended to prepare other porous metal oxide nanomaterials with specific structures and morphologies.