Tunneling holes in microparticles to facilitate the transport of lithium ions for high volumetric density batteries.

Microscale materials generally have a higher tap density than that of random nanoparticles. Therefore, microparticles have been attracting much attention for application as high volumetric density electrodes for lithium ion batteries. However, microparticles have much longer electrolyte diffusion and Li-ion migration length and less accessibility to the electrolyte than that of nanoparticles. Therefore, it will be interesting to tunnel-holes in the high volumetric density microparticles to facilitate the reversible storage of lithium ions. Here, tunnel-like holes were generated in microparticles to dramatically increase the accessibility of the active materials to facilitate the lithium ion transfer. A plausible formation mechanism to explain the generation of tunnel-like holes was proposed based on time-course experiments and intensive characterization. Impressively, the as-prepared microbeads with tunnels demonstrated dramatically improved performance compared to the solid microbeads without tunnels in lithium ion storage. The microparticles with tunnels could achieve comparable electrochemical performances to those nanoparticles reported in the literature, suggesting that microparticles, properly tuned, could be promising candidates as negative electrodes for lithium-ion batteries and worthy of further studies. We also directly measured the volumetric density of the microparticles. We would like to highlight that a superior volumetric capacity of 514 mA h cm(-3) has been achieved. We hope to promote more frequent use of the unit mA h cm(-3) in addition to the conventional unit mA h g(-1) in the battery community.