Bimodal porous structure tin oxide anode materials for lithium ion batteries

Alloying transition metal oxides such as tin oxide (SnO2) can lead to promising anode material candidates owing to the high theoretical capacity of such oxides. However, huge volume changes experienced by such materials hinder the long-term cycling stability. Herein, we report a SnO2 anode with a bimodal porous architecture fabricated using a randomly packed silica template with a Sn precursor. The synthesized bimodal porous electrode with SnO2 nanoparticles with diameters ∼10 nm was fabricated using controlled silica sizes to achieve controlled pore structures for alleviating the issue of volume change and showed a specific capacity of 727 mAh g−1 and cycling stability for use in lithium-ion batteries.