Yu Han, Weihang Xie, Grant T Hill, Paul Smeets, Xiaobing Hu, Gangbin Yan, Siqi Zou, Jiadong Liu, Ronghui Wu, Fengyuan Shi, Hua Zhou, Pieremanuele Canepa, Chong Liu
Ion exchange is a powerful method to access metastable materials with advanced functionalities for energy storage applications. However, high concentrations and unfavourably large excesses of lithium are always used for synthesizing lithium cathodes from parent sodium material, and the reaction pathways remain elusive. Here, using layered oxides as model materials, we demonstrate that vacancy level and its corresponding lithium preference are critical in determining the accessible and inaccessible ion exchange pathways...
April 16, 2024: Nature Materials