Abstract
Lithium transition metal phosphates have become of great interest as storage cathodes for rechargeable lithium batteries because of their high energy density, low raw materials cost, environmental friendliness and safety. Their key limitation has been extremely low electronic conductivity, until now believed to be intrinsic to this family of compounds. Here we show that controlled cation non-stoichiometry combined with solid-solution doping by metals supervalent to Li+ increases the electronic conductivity of LiFePO4 by a factor of ā¼108. The resulting materials show near-theoretical energy density at low charge/discharge rates, and retain significant capacity with little polarization at rates as high as 6,000 mA gā1. In a conventional cell design, they may allow development of lithium batteries with the highest power density yet.
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Acknowledgements
We thank W. D. Moorehead, P. Limthongkul and B. P. Nunes for assistance. This research was supported by the US Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Grant No. DE-FG02-87-ER45307, and used Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT supported by NSF Grant No. 94004-DMR.
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Chung, SY., Bloking, J. & Chiang, YM. Electronically conductive phospho-olivines as lithium storage electrodes. Nature Mater 1, 123ā128 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat732
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat732
