Impact of Carbon Nanostructures as Additives with Spinel Li4Ti5O12/LiMn2O4 Electrodes for Lithium Ion Battery Technology

Spinel structured nanomaterials have shown good stability for lithium ion storage applications. Among all, Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) anode and LiMn2O4 (LMO) cathode is a potential combination for high energy and high power applications. In the present work, we utilize this specific combination to fabricate full-cells in combination with carbon nanostructures as additives. Typically, 20-25 nm sized LTO and 200-500 nm sized LMO nanoparticle electrodes are composited with carbon nanostructures including, carbon nanotube (CNT), carbon black (CB) and graphene nanoplatelets (GNP). High rate performance of respective half-cells (lithium metal as counter electrode) of LTO and LMO are tested up to 50C. It was found that half-cells with CNT additive retained almost 80% of its 1C rate capacity at 50C rate. Also both the electrodes exhibited 1000 cycles stability with retention of about 80% at 10C rate cycling. Using these CNT additive based electrodes, a full-cell fabricated and tested exhibited high capacity and stable cycling over 500 cycles at 1000 mA/g specific current. The full-cell delivered power density of about 2310 W/kg and energy density of about 140 Wh/kg that can be further improved for high power Li-ion battery technology.