Vanadium oxide nanostructures for lithium battery applications

Lithium and Lithium-ion batteries for portable electronic devices and hybrid electric vehicles have gained great importance for energy storage today. However, how to prepare cathode materials with higher energy density, high potentials, and longer cycle life is still a challenge. Compared with commercial LiCoO2, vanadium oxides have higher specific capacity and interesting layered structures, which permit a wide variety of other molecules or cations to intercalate into the layers. This makes vanadium oxides such as V2O5, VO2, V6O13, VOx·H2O, LiV3O8, vanadium oxide gels, NH4V4O10, silver vanadium oxides, etc. likely to have the potential to offer much higher capacities. However, vanadium oxides are limited by fast capacity fading due to a decrease of the lithium diffusion coefficient DLi and low electrical conductivity at the state of discharge. Recently, nanostructured cathodes are found to have excellent cycling performance because nanostructured materials have higher surface area, shorter Li ion diffusion lengths, and facile strain relaxation upon electrochemical cycling. Here we mainly review some typical nanostructured vanadium oxides such as VOx nanotubes, VO2 nanowires, V2O5 nanowires/nanorods, VOx·H2O nanowires, silver vanadium oxide nanowires, etc. and their applications in lithium batteries based on the recent research and our group’s results.