Sulphur-reduced self-assembly of flower-like vanadium pentoxide as superior cathode material for Li- ion battery

Abstract Flower-like self-assembly of vanadium pentoxide (V 2 O 5 ) has been synthesized via a facile, eco-friendly and bottom-up approach using hydrothermal process at low temperature with high-yield for the first time. This hierarchical flower-like structure is found to be accumulated with numerous plate-like subunits, and each unit seems to be a complete structure of randomly grown hexagonal nano/micro plates. A possible reaction mechanism for the formation of hierarchical flower-like structures of V 2 O 5 has also been proposed. The reduction process (from V 5+ to V 4+ or some mix oxidation states)is carried out through sulphur-reduction by using an advanced homemade CVD system with argon as the carrier gas at different temperatures. The sulphur reduced V 2 O 5 structure formed shows excellent lithium storage and rate capability. After sulphur-reduction, the specific capacity of the flower-like V 2 O 5 as the cathode material can achieve 400 mAh g −1 , 300 mAh g −1 , 250 mAh g −1 and 100 mAh g −1 at different rates of 0.07C, 1C, 2.3C and 29 C, respectively between 1.75 V and 4 V.