Bifunctional, Carbon-Free Nickel/Cobalt-Oxide Cathodes for Lithium-Air Batteries with an Aqueous Alkaline Electrolyte

• High activity bi-functional catalyst combination for ORR and OER .
• An optimum ratio of high active bi-functional catalysts was found.
• Novel electrodes without carbon to avoid carbon corrosion during OER mode.
• EIS model for OER describes influence of a growing oxide layers.
• Long-term test exhibited an excellent long-term stability over 1200 cycles.

Lithium-air batteries with an aqueous alkaline electrolyte promise a very high practical energy density and capacity. These batteries are mainly limited by high overpotentials on the bifunctional cathode during charge and discharge. To reduce overpotentials the bifunctional cathode of such batteries must be improved significantly. Nickel is relatively inexpensive and has a good catalytic activity in alkaline media. Co3O4 was found to be a promising metal oxide catalyst for oxygen evolution in alkaline media but it has a low electronic conductivity. On the other hand since nickel has a good electronic conductivity Co3O4 can be added to pure nickel electrodes to enhance performance due to a synergetic effect. Due to the poor stability of carbon materials at high anodic potentials, gas diffusion electrodes were prepared without carbon to improve especially long-term stability. Gas diffusion electrodes were electrochemically investigated in a half cell. In addition, cyclic voltammogrametry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were carried out. SEM was used for the physical and morphological investigations. Investigations showed that electrodes containing 20 wt.% Co3O4 exhibited the highest performance.