Resorcinol-Formaldehyde Carbon Xerogels as Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes: Synthesis, Grinding, Coating on current collector and Electrochemical characterization

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries show great advantages over traditional batteries and are extensively used for consumer electronic devices due to their high energy density and long cycle life. However, the improvement of performance of current lithium-ion batteries requires the optimization of the materials used (electrolyte and electrodes). Therefore, tremendous efforts have been dedicated to exploring new materials with high capacity, excellent cycling performance, low cost and high safety features [1-4]. As an example, carbon xerogels are promising candidates in the development of new high performance C-based anode materials for Li-ion batteries, since such carbonaceous materials show very small changes of volume during the charge/discharge process, providing an improved cycle life. Nevertheless, hard carbons also exhibit quite high irreversible capacity losses due to their intrinsic high microporosity and, compared to graphite, a poor rate performance related to slow diffusion of Li in the internal structure [5-6]. To reduce these disadvantages, the structural and textural characteristics need to be carefully controlled. Also, due to the different morphology of these materials compared to graphite, the deposition of carbon xerogels on current collectors needs to be studied in detail.
In this work, porous carbon xerogels were synthetized from Resorcinol-Formaldehyde mixtures by adjusting the pH of the solution in order to obtain different mesopore sizes. Monoliths of carbon xerogels were obtained after drying of the polymer gel and pyrolysis [7]. Mercury intrusion porosimetry and nitrogen adsorption techniques (BET) was used to characterize the pore texture of the carbon xerogels. These monoliths were ground to particles around 10 µm for all the samples. The resulting powders were then mixed with a binder and a solvent to form slurries and then cast on copper foil using a bar coater. After evaporation of the solvent, the resulting coatings were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) for the morphology and their thickness was monitored by profilometry.
The resulting electrodes were subjected to electrochemical characterization. Since the particle sizes and the method of coating was the same for all the samples, it was possible to evaluate selectively the influence of the textural and structural parameters of the different carbon materials on their performances. Electrochemical characterizations were performed using charge-discharge galvanostatic curves and cyclic voltammetry in Li/C half cells between 0.005 and 1.5 V vs. Li+/Li.

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