Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides, LiNixMnyCozO2 (NMCs, x + y + z = 1) are among the most promising cathodes for next-generation lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) and beyond. Ni-rich NMCs (x ≥ 0.6) are particularly attractive, ascribed to their higher capacity and lower cost. Along with increasing Ni contents, however, the inherent issues of NMCs become more and more challenging. Striving for addressing these issues, a variety of strategies has been investigated. Among them, surface coating features its facileness and effectiveness. In this regard, atomic layer deposition (ALD) has emerged as an important technique in the past decade, featuring its unique capability for uniform and conformal coatings over either prefabricated electrodes or electrode powders at low temperature. Aimed at gaining a better understanding on the effects of various coating materials, recently we have devoted to investigating Li-free oxides, Li-containing oxides, and sulfides via ALD. Among these efforts, we demonstrated that both Li-free oxides and Li-containing oxides are beneficial to protect NMCs from microcracking, parasitic reactions, and metal dissolution. Li-containing oxides could show better effects than those of Li-free oxides, due to their higher ionic conductivity. Particularly, we for the first time have revealed that, compared to Li-free oxides and Li-containing oxides, sulfides have exhibited some unusual effects in improving the performance of Ni-rich NMCs. It was found that sulfides could experience some favorable conversion during charge-discharge processes and thereby exhibited better protection effects on NMCs. All these efforts are inspiring and helpful for us to search for desirable coating films for Ni-rich NMCs.

High-performance nickel-rich metal oxide cathodes by nanocoatings of atomic layer deposition

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