Mesoporous titania anodes with tunable structural properties and improved electrochemical performance for Li-ion batteries

Mesoporous titanias (MTs)with controllable structural properties were successfully synthesized following a sol-gel method for improved electrochemical characteristics for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Under the experimental conditions studied herein, by carefully considering the synthesis conditions including template type, amount of nitric acid and template, the BET surface area, pore volume and pore size of the resulting MTs could be adjusted in wide ranges of 83 m ² g ^-1 to 170 m ² g ^-1 , 0.10 cm ³ g ^-1 to 0.46 cm ³ g ^-1 and 3.1 nm–12.6 nm, respectively. When used as anode for LIBs, the intrinsic mesoporosity of MTs enabled the large contact interface with electrolyte, thus the substantially reduced resistance of lithium ions, afforded the MTs to possess good cycling performance and rate capability. Herein, a stable specific capacity of 131.2 mA h g ⁻¹ even after 1000 cycles at 1C rate was obtained. The capacity fade rate per cycle was only 0.016%, showing an excellent potential for application in high-power LIBs.