Synthesis and enhanced electrochemical performance of the honeycomb TiO2/LiMn2O4 cathode materials

Abstract

LiMn2O4 electrode suffers serious capacity fading during cycling in LiPF6-based liquid electrolytes. In this work, we synthesized a new type of cathode materials, i.e., the TiO2/LiMn2O4 hybrid material with honeycomb morphology, which exhibits an increased cyclability compared to the LiMn2O4. We characterized the morphology and structure of the synthesized materials by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The honeycomb morphology was identified using SEM. The XRD patterns show that the Bragg peak of the plane (111) for TiO2/LiMn2O4 appears at the lower diffraction angle compare to LiMn2O4, implying that TiO2 doping induced a change of crystal structure. By performing electrochemical measurements, we observed an enhancement of specific capacity (127.28 mAhg−1) and an improvement of cycling stability in the TiO2/LiMn2O4 hybrid materials. After 100 cycles of charge/discharge between 3.0 and 4.3 V at 0.5 C at room temperature, the 3.0 mol% titanium sol modified LiMn2O4 exhibited capacity retention of 90.44 %, which is considerably higher than that of the pure LiMn2O4