Designed constitution of NiO/Ni nanostructured electrode for high performance lithium ion battery

Porous NiO/Ni foam electrode is fabricated by a simple two-step method. Firstly, nickel hydroxide hydrate nanoflakes are deposited on Ni foam via a chemical liquid deposition (CLD) method. Then NiO/Ni architecture is obtained by subsequent graft growth in air atmosphere at 350 °C. Galvanostatic battery testing shows that NiO electrode exhibits fine capacity retention and good rate performance. It exhibits high initial discharge and charge capacity of 1.94 and 1.36 mAh cm−2, maintaining of 1.41 and 1.38 mAh cm−2 after 140 cycles under a discharge/charge rate of 0.4 C. It delivers high discharge capacity retention of 70% (comparing with that of 0.2 C) even at a high rate of 2.5 C. After that, the discharge capacity can gradually resume along with the decrease of discharge/charge rate, showing capacity retention of 105% when lowering the discharge/charge rate to 0.2 C. The fine electrochemical performance of NiO/Ni is due to the maintenance of porous architecture and the prevention of active nano-sized NiO from aggregation in cycling, which is relevant to both the interweaved structure of NiO nanoflakes and the graft growth between NiO and Ni.