Johnson, Ian David; (2017) Continuous Hydrothermal Synthesis of Nanomaterials for Rechargeable Battery Applications. Doctoral thesis (Eng.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates Continuous Hydrothermal Flow Synthesis (CHFS) as a method to produce materials for rechargeable batteries. The key advantages of this technology are the scalability (up to 2 kg h−1 production rate), rapidity (synthesis time on order of seconds) and low reaction temperature (≤ 400 °C) of this method, which is capable of producing materials in the nanoscale. Nanoparticles (< 100 nm diameter) are of high interest for rechargeable battery applications, due to their high surface area and enhanced charge/discharge kinetics. Various materials (and their doped analogues) for Li-ion and Mg-ion batteries were made, including the olivine family of materials (LiFePO4 and LiMnPO4), layered oxides (LiCoO2 and LiNixMnyCozO2) and spinels (MgCr2O4). Many of these phases have never been synthesised previously via CHFS, and display enhanced performance compared to other literature reports. The effects of dopants on the crystallography and electrochemical performance of these compounds were examined using a variety of techniques, including EXAFS, muon spectroscopy and Rietveld refinement. This allowed the discovery of novel composition-structure-property relationships, and the optimisation of arrays of materials across a phase diagram. In summary, CHFS has been employed to generate novel battery materials at semiindustrial scale, which were evaluated for electrochemical performance.

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