Hollow carbon sphere/metal oxide nanocomposite anodes for lithium-ion batteries

TL;DR

This study develops hollow carbon sphere/metal oxide nanocomposites as anodes for lithium-ion batteries, demonstrating enhanced capacity and stability due to the conductive and mesoporous structure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel synthesis of HCS/metal oxide nanocomposites that significantly improve lithium-ion battery anode performance.

Findings

Charge capacity of HCS/SnO2 reaches 370 mAh/g after 45 cycles.

HCS/MnO2 achieves 266 mAh/g, outperforming pristine HCS.

Both composites show excellent long-term cycling stability.

Abstract

Hollow carbon spheres (HCS) covered with metal oxide nanoparticles (SnO2 and MnO2, respectively) were successfully synthesized and investigated regarding their potential as anode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Raman spectroscopy shows a high degree of graphitization for the HCS host structure. The mesoporous nature of the nanocomposites is confirmed by Brunauer-Emmett-Teller analysis. For both metal oxides under study, the metal oxide functionalization of HCS yields a significant increase of electrochemical performance. The charge capacity of HCS/SnO2 is 370 mAh/g after 45 cycles (266 mAh/g in HCS/MnO2) which clearly exceeds the value of 188 mAh/g in pristine HCS. Remarkably, the data imply excellent long term cycling stability after 100 cycles in both cases. The results hence show that mesoporous HCS/metal oxide nanocomposites enable exploiting the potential of metal oxide anode materials in Lithium-ion batteries by providing a HCS host structure which is both conductive and stable enough to accommodate big volume change effects.