The role of thermal annealing on the microstructures of (Ti, Fe)-alloyed Si thin-film anodes for high-performance Li-ion batteries

Minsub Oh; Ilwhan Kim; Hoo-Jeong Lee; Seungmin Hyun; Chiwon Kang

doi:10.1039/c7ra13172k

The role of thermal annealing on the microstructures of (Ti, Fe)-alloyed Si thin-film anodes for high-performance Li-ion batteries

RSC Adv. 2018 Mar 1;8(17):9168-9174. doi: 10.1039/c7ra13172k. eCollection 2018 Feb 28.

Authors

Minsub Oh¹, Ilwhan Kim^{1

2}, Hoo-Jeong Lee¹, Seungmin Hyun², Chiwon Kang¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University Suwon Republic of Korea chiwonkang@skku.edu.
² Nano-Convergence Mechanical Systems Research Division, Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) Daejeon Republic of Korea hyun@kimm.re.kr.

Abstract

Here, we studied the effect of thermal annealing on the microstructure and cyclic stability of a (Ti, Fe)-alloyed Si thin-film fabricated by a simple sputtering deposition method for Li-ion battery (LIB) anodes. The anode samples annealed at different temperatures (300-600 °C) were subjected to microstructure analysis and LIB performance test. The (Ti, Fe)-alloyed Si thin-film anode delivered a high capacity of 1563 mA h g^-1 for 100 cycles at 0.1 A g^-1 with nearly 100% capacity retention. Post-mortem analysis using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) disclosed the microstructural changes of the cycled anodes, revealing that (Ti, Fe) silicides served as a structural buffer against the large volume change of active Si during cycling for enhanced LIB performance.