Synthesis of Battery Materials

Synthesis is critical not only to the generation of new materials for exploration of new structures and fundamental properties, but also for the formation of materials with the optimum electrochemical behavior for commercial devices. The technique used is quite often very different for the above two cases. The initial synthesis of a material should provide it in a pure enough state that its intrinsic behavior and properties can be determined; it should for example be possible to accurately determine whether its structure is cubic spinel, layered or some other form. There is presently much confusion in the literature because the synthesized material was insufficiently well-characterized. Once well characterized, the material needs to be synthesized in a form suitable to be used in a battery, for example it may be doped or coated to enhance the conductivity, its particle size and morphology will be optimized for maximum reactivity but minimum corrosivity and side-reactions.

Many battery materials are metastable phases, and therefore non-traditional synthesis methods must be devised to allow kinetics to over-ride thermodynamics. Hence, many soft chemistry techniques have come to the fore such as hydrothermal, ion-exchange, intercalation, etc. In addition, to optimize the formation of the desired material frequently the reactants are finely mixed prior to final reaction by for example sol-gel formation or co-precipitation as hydroxides.