Processing as Viable Strategy for Forming High Performance Lithium Ion Battery Electrodes

Future applications of energy storage devices such as lithium ion batteries will require substantial improvement in electrochemical performance. Key metrics will be higher specific capacity leading to high energy and power densities, high Coulombic efficiency, and low capacity fade over several hundred to several thousand charge-discharge cycles.

Developments in this area can be divided into two distinct parts (i) efforts to discover new materials, or (ii) devise novel strategies for placing already known materials into optimal configurations. The latter strategy will be reviewed in this presentation. Vapor phase and colloidal processing techniques to create nanostructured anodes will be described, and the performance of half cells created by these methods will be analyzed. Several challenges still remain, and these will be  discussed.