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Nanostructured materials have triggered a great excitement in recent times due to both fundamental interest as well as
technological impact relevant for lithium ion batteries (LIBs). Size reduction in nanocrystals leads to a variety of
unexpected exciting phenomena due to enhanced surface-to-volume ratio and reduced transport length. We will consider
a few examples of nanostructured electrode materials in the context of lithium batteries for achieving high storage and
high rate performances: 1) LiFePO4 nanoplates synthesized using solvothermal method could store Li-ions comparable to its theoretical capacity at C/10, while at 30C, they exhibit storage capacity up to 45 mAh/g. Size reduction (~30 nm) at the b-axis
favors the fast Li-ion diffusion. In addition to this, uniform ~5 nm carbon coating throughout the plates provides excellent electronically conducting path for electrons. This nano architecture enables fast insertion/extraction of both Li-ions as well as electrons; 2) Mesporous-TiO2 with high surface area (135m2/g) synthesized using soft-template method exhibits high
volumetric density compared to commercial nanopowder (P25), with excellent Li-storage behavior. C16 meso-TiO2 synthesized from CTAB exhibits reversible storage capacity of 288mAh/g at 0.2C and 109 mAh/g at 30C; 3) Zero strain Li4Ti5O12 anode material has been synthesized using several wet chemical routes. The best condition has been optimized to achieve storage capability close to theoretical limit of 175mAh/g at C/10. At 10C, we could retain lithium storage up to 88 mAh/g; 4) We report our recent results on α-Fe2O3 and γ-Fe2O3 using conversion reaction, providing insight for a better storage capability in γ-phase than the α-phase at 2C resulting solely from the nanocrystallinity.
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