Lithium (Li)-ion batteries (LIB) have governed the current worldwide rechargeable battery market due to their outstanding energy and power capability. In particular, the LIB’s role in enabling electric vehicles (EVs) has been highlighted to replace the current oil-driven vehicles in order to reduce the usage of oil resources and generation of CO 2 gases. Unlike Li, sodium is one of the more abu...

Rechargeable lithium-ion battery technology dominates the portable electronics market following the rapid growth in demand since the introduction of the first, commercial lithium-ion battery by Sony in 1990 [1]. Motivated by concerns for global warming and environmental degradation, researchers have focused on extending the use of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to large-scale applications. ...

Nanostructured materials lie at the heart of fundamental advances in efficient energy storage and/or conversion, in which surface processes and transport kinetics play determining roles. Nanocomposite materials will have a further enhancement in properties compared to their constituent phases. This Review describes some recent developments of nanocomposite materials for high-performance Li-ion ...

The potentially high gravimetric capacities of intermetallic anodes, coupled with the low cost and readily available materials used in sodium-ion batteries, has generated interest in antimony—an anode capable of alloying with sodium. However, presently there are few synthetic routes to antimony particles for use in sodium-ion batteries. One pot, sol-gel synthetic routes from readily available, ...

*Correspondence: P. Chen, Department of Chemical Engineering and Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L3G1, Canada e-mail: [email protected] Lithium-rich layered powders, Li2MnO3-stabilized LiMO2 (M=Ni, Co, Mn), are attractive cathode candidates for the next generations of high-energy lithium-ion batteries. However, most of ...

BACKGROUND The thermal stability of iron oxide nanowires, which were obtained with a hard template method and are promising elements of Li-ion based batteries, has been investigated by means of thermogravimetry, infrared and photoemission spectroscopy measurements. RESULTS The chemical state of the nanowires is typical of the Fe2O3 phase and the stoichiometry changes towards a Fe3O4 phase by ...

Following an explosion of studies of silicon as a negative electrode for Li-ion batteries, the anomalous volumetric changes and fracture of lithiated single Si particles have attracted significant attention in various fields, including mechanics. However, in real batteries, lithiation occurs simultaneously in clusters of Si in a confined medium. Hence, understanding how the individual Si struct...

Rechargeable aluminum-ion batteries are promising in high-power density but still face critical challenges of limited lifetime, rate capability, and cathodic capacity. We design a "trihigh tricontinuous" (3H3C) graphene film cathode with features of high quality, orientation, and channeling for local structures (3H) and continuous electron-conducting matrix, ion-diffusion highway, and electroac...

Graphene is composed of a single atomic layer of carbon which has excellent mechanical, electrical and optical properties. It has the potential to be widely used in the fields of physics, chemistry, information, energy and device manufacturing. In this paper, we briefly review the concept, structure, properties, preparation methods of graphene and its application in lithium ion batteries. A con...