Engineering of highly conductive and mesoporous ZrV2O7 : a cathode material for lithium secondary batteries

The performance of the cathode materials can be enhanced significantly by manipulating the surface properties through a nano-structuring. Porous ZrV2O7 is synthesized, in the present study, by a facile one-step solution-based method wherein the proposed method and the ZrV2O7 have the advantages of less preparation time, low cost, small crystallite size, porous structure, and good electrical conductivity, which dramatically improves the electrochemical properties. The porous ZrV2O7 electrode exhibits the conductivity of 0.57 × 10 −6  S/cm, which is close to the conductivity of the traditional cathode materials LiMn2O4 (10−6  S cm−1 ). The galvanostatic charge-discharge results reveal that the porous ZrV2O7 delivers excellent discharge capacity of 159 mAh g−1 and 126 mAh g−1 at C/10 and 1 C (C = charge and discharge) rate, respectively, besides excellent reversibility.