International Journal of ChemTech Research CODEN (USA): IJCRGG ISSN : 0974-4290 Vol.6, No.3, pp 1962-1964, May-June 2014 ICMCT-2014 [10 th – 12 th March 2014] International Conference on Materials and Characterization Techniques Investigations on Structural and Electrical Properties of Li 2 NiSiO 4 Manas Ranjan Panda, Rajesh Cheruku, G. Govindaraj* Department of Physics, Pondicherry University, R. Venkataraman Nagar, Kalapet, Pondicherry 605 014, India. *Corresp. Author: ggraj_7@yahoo.com Abstract: A nanocrystalline Li 2 NiSiO 4 has been prepared by sol-gel synthesis technique. The annealed samples were characterized using TG-DTA, XRD and SEM-EDX. XRD pattern show the crystalline nature of the samples well appreciating the thermal behaviour of the materials, at temperature between 800°C-1000°C given stable phase. Morphology of the materials was investigated through the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and the particles were found to be ofspherical shapes. The chemical composition was identified by the techniques of Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) along with X-ray mapping that is integrated with SEM. The electrical relaxation studies were explored using the conductivity spectrum comprises of super-linear power law (SPL) dependence. The activation energies were calculated from straight line fit to beEσ= (0.25±0.03) eV, Ec 1 = (0.21±0.03) and Ec 2 = (0.13±0.02) eV. The temperature dependence of dc conductivity and hopping frequency is evident from Arrhenius plots. Keywords:Silicates; cathode materials; stable phase;super-linear power law (SPL). Introduction and Experimental: Many experimental and theoretical studies have proved that Li 2 MSiO 4 are promising candidates that can replace for LiFePO 4 [1]. The reason for the alternative is the possibility of extracting two lithium ions for a two electron redox process while only one lithium ion can be extracted in LiFePO 4 . Among them, Fe and Mn systems have been studied well and proven to exhibit a very high capacity as well as chemical stability properties [2]. With the same structure, Li 2 NiSiO 4 is also expected to possess such high capacity and stability and a higher voltage, and needed a systematic investigation of its electrochemical and transport properties. In this work, to determine the energy barrier of the Li diffusion, we calculated the activation energy profile of the elementary processes.By using the super-linear power law (SPL) method[3]. High purity Nickel (II) Nitrate (Ni(NO 3 ) 2 ),Tetraethyl Orthosilicate (Si(OC 2 H 5 ) 4 ) are used as the starting materials and Citric acid (C 6 H 8 O 7 ) as the fuel for this method .In order to avoid moisture the experiment was done in the nitrogen atmosphere. The as prepared sample was annealed at 800 °C, 900 °C and 1000 °C respectively in air for 4 hrs. Results and Discussion: All the observed diffraction lines are indexed to most frequently observe in the Pmn2 1 space group [4] with the orthorhombic structure [5, 6]. The average crystallites size calculated for each sample using Scherer’s