Synthesis of Rice Ball Shaped Rare Earth-Carbon Composite Electrode Material for Lithium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

The CeO2, known as one of the typical rare earth oxides, is seen to have considerable potential for being used as novel anode materials for secondary batteries because it shows excellent electrochemical redox properties. When it is considered as an anode material, the foremost advantages are that its volumetric and morphological changes are hardly observed, so it could provide good stability and longevity of secondary batteries. It is well explained by the fully reversible phase transformation between fluorite structured CeO2 and cubic structured Ce2O3 during the electrochemical reaction. Nonetheless, it is essential to improve the conductivity problem of the CeO2 which has intrinsically low electron conductivity in order to apply it to secondary batteries. Meanwhile, there used to be a widely used method called carbon composite method to support nonconductive metal oxides. In this study, we have synthesized the CeO2-Carbon composite sphere in the form of rice balls to improve the conductivity problems of the rare earth oxide during their electrochemical performance. A rice ball structure is expected to provide more advanced electronic conductive networks than a core shell structure does. Indeed, high stability was observed during the charging and discharging process of LIB due to the nanostructures in the form of rice balls.