Graphene-vanadium 'ribbons' enhance battery performance

The Rice University lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan determined that the material is a superior cathode for batteries that could supply high energy density and significant power density. The research appears online this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

The ribbons created at Rice are claimed to have potential that far outweighs current materials for their ability to charge and discharge very quickly. Cathodes built into half-cells for testing at Rice fully charged and discharged in 20 seconds and retained more than 90 per cent of their initial capacity after more than 1,000 cycles.

‘This is the direction battery research is going, not only for something with high energy density but also high power density,’ Ajayan said in a statement. ‘It’s somewhere between a battery and a supercapacitor.’

The ribbons also have the advantage of using relatively abundant and cheap materials. ‘This is done through a very simple hydrothermal process, and I think it would be easily scalable to large quantities,’ he said.

Ajayan said vanadium oxide has long been considered a material with great potential, and vanadium pentoxide has been used in lithium-ion batteries for its structure and high capacity. But oxides are slow to charge and discharge, due to their low electrical conductivity. The high-conductivity graphene lattice that is literally baked in solves that problem, he said, by serving as a rapid conduit for electrons and channels for ions.

The atom-thin graphene sheets bound to the crystals take up very little bulk. In the best samples made at Rice, 84 per cent of the cathode’s weight was the lithium-slurping VO2, which held 204 milliamp hours of energy per gram. The researchers, led by Rice graduate student Yongji Gong and lead author Shubin Yang, said they believe that to be among the best overall performance ever seen for lithium-ion battery electrodes.

‘One challenge to production was controlling the conditions for the co-synthesis of VO2 ribbons with graphene,’ Yang said. The process involved suspending graphene oxide nanosheets with powdered vanadium pentoxide (layered vanadium oxide, with two atoms of vanadium and five of oxygen) in water and heating it in an autoclave. The vanadium pentoxide was completely reduced to VO2, which crystallized into ribbons, while the graphene oxide was reduced to graphene, Yang said. The ribbons, with a web-like coating of graphene, were about 10 nanometres thick, up to 600 nanometres wide and tens of micrometers in length.

‘These ribbons were the building blocks of the three-dimensional architecture,’ Yang said. ‘This unique structure was favourable for the ultrafast diffusion of both lithium ions and electrons during charge and discharge processes. It was the key to the achievement of excellent electrochemical performance.’

In testing the new material, Yang and Gong found its capacity for lithium storage remained stable after 200 cycles even at high temperatures (167 degrees Fahrenheit) at which other cathodes commonly decay, even at low charge-discharge rates.