Enhancement of cycling stability and capacity of lithium secondary battery by engineering highly porous AlV3O9

Nowadays, the development of nanostructures of oxide-based materials gained significant research interest owing to their new merits and avenues to design better electrodes for lithium-ion battery. It is well known that vanadium and vanadium-based oxide materials have high theoretical capacity but the practical applications are limited mainly due to the fast capacity fading, resulting from the structural collapse, upon cycling and poor electronic conductivity. In this paper, we demonstrate the fabrication of mesoporous vanadium-based oxide with nanostructures, which significantly improved the capacity fading upon cycling. A simple and generic synthetic protocol has been proposed to synthesize highly porous AlV3O9 using aluminum nitrate and ammonium vanadate with the assistance of sucrose. It is found that the decomposition of surface-adsorbed sucrose during the course of AlV3O9 preparation creates homogeneously distributed mesopores. The prepared porous AlV3O9 has been used to fabricate positive electrode for lithium rechargeable battery where high discharge capacity of 240 mAhg−1 was achieved at 0.2 C rate, which is comparable to the best reported results of vanadium-based positive electrodes. The characteristic features are 240 mAhg−1 capacity and ~ 100% columbic efficiency, demonstrating porous AlV3O9 as a promising cathode material for high-power batteries.