Fast and Universal Approach to Encapsulating Transition Bimetal Oxide Nanoparticles in Amorphous Carbon Nanotubes under an Atmospheric Environment Based on the Marangoni Effect

Li, Shuoyu; Liu, Yuyi; Guo, Peisheng; Wang, Chengxin

Fast and Universal Approach to Encapsulating Transition Bimetal Oxide Nanoparticles in Amorphous Carbon Nanotubes under an Atmospheric Environment Based on the Marangoni Effect

2017

Li, Shuoyu | Liu, Yuyi | Guo, Peisheng | Wang, Chengxin

Transition metal oxide nanoparticles capsuled in amorphous carbon nanotubes (ACNTs) are attractive anode materials of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Here, we first designed a fast and universal method with a hydromechanics conception which is called Marangoni flow to fabricate transition bimetal oxides (TBOs) in the ACNT composite with a better electrochemistry performance. Marangoni flows can produce a liquid column with several centimeters of height in a tube with one side immersed in the liquid. The key point to induce a Marangoni flow is to make a gradient of the surface tension between the surface and the inside of the solution. With our research, we control the gradient of the surface tension by controlling the viscosity of a solution. To show how our method could be generally used, we synthesize two anode materials such as (a) CoFe₂O₄@ACNTs, and (b) NiFe₂O₄@ACNTs. All of these have a similar morphology which is ∼20 μm length with a diameter of 80–100 nm for the ACNTs, and the particles (inside the ACNTs) are smaller than 5 nm. In particular, there are amorphous carbons between the nanoparticles. All of the composite materials showed an outstanding electrochemistry performance which includes a high capacity and cycling stability so that after 600 cycles the capacity changed by less than 3%.

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