Nanostructured electrodes continue to be of interest for energy storage applications, as high surface areas and shortened diffusion pathways should provide increased energy and power density over bulk electrodes of the same materials. However, many typical nanostructures are disordered and randomly dispersed, and they often still require the use polymer binders and carbon additives which can obscure the properties of the active materials themselves, as well as primarily being dead weight in the electrode. It can be difficult to draw broadly applicable conclusions without the ability to test electrodes with uniform and systematically variable geometries. As 3-D structures have become of greater interest in energy storage, there is a need to be able to explore the relationship between structure and performance on a controlled, nanostructured testbed. Here we present electrodes produced by controllably interlinking an array of uniform nanotubes using a tailored aluminum anodization scheme developed in our group. Active materials like V2O5 can be conformally coated onto these templates using atomic layer deposition (ALD). The combination of these techniques allows us to create a series of systematically varied electrodes ranging from simple parallel nanotube arrays to arrays interlinked in many regions, while maintaining very thin layers of active material to facilitate optimum performance. These electrodes are then characterized electrochemically using cyclic voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and galvanostatic charging and discharging, to investigate both storage mechanism, power performance and long term cycle stability as a function of electrode structure.

Controllably branched 3D electrodes as a test bed for investigating the effect of morphology on the performance of nanostructured V2O5 cathodes for Li ion batteries

249th National Meeting (2015)

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