The traditional commercial polyolefin separators suffer from high-temperature thermal shrinkage, low electrolyte wettability and other issues. In order to improve the overall performance of the separators, electrostatic spinning technology was applied to obtain PAN nanofiber separators with an average diameter of 320 nm. Then cellulose acetate (CA) resin and nano-hydroxyapatite (HAP) were introduced to fabricate the PAN/CA/HAP composite separators through the constant temperature hot pressing and dip-coating crafts. The composite separator has a good thermal stability, with no significant dimensional change after a constant temperature treatment of 200 °C for 35 min. The electrolyte uptake rate of the PAN/CA/HAP-1.0 composite separator reaches 281%, which exhibits an efficient ionic conductivity. At the same time, it also attains a tensile strength of 11.18 MPa, which meets the requirement for separator use. Button cells assembled from PAN/CA/HAP-1.0 composite separators have an excellent rate of performance (160.42 mAh·g-1 at 0.2 C) and cycle capability (157.6 mAh·g-1 after 50 cycles at 0.5 C). The results support that lithium-ion batteries assembled with PAN/CA/HAP-1.0 composite separators will exhibit higher safety stability and better electrochemical performance than that of polyolefin separators, with a very immense potential for application.
Keywords: lithium-ion batteries; nano-hydroxyapatite; polyacrylonitrile; separator.