Porous Li 1.2 Mn 0.53 Ni 0.13 Co 0.13 O 2 as a high capacity and high rate capability cathode material for next generation Li-ion batteries Tirupathi Rao Penki and D. Shanmughasundaram and N. Munichandraiah* Department of Inorganic and Physical chemistry Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore-560012, India E-mail: muni@ipc.iisc.ernet.in For the purpose of developing next generation of Li-ion batteries with increased energy density, high capacity lithium rich manganese oxide, namely, Li 2 MnO 3 is considered as a potentially important cathode material. 1 In addition to its very high theoretical capacity (460 mAh g -1 ), Li 2 MnO 3 is inexpensive and environmental friendly. Li 2 MnO 3 is layered structure with the oxidation number of Mn as +4 in the discharged state. It is electrochemically inactive. The Li 2 MnO 3 is activated by either chemical or electrochemical method. Here, a composite of Li 2 MnO 3 and LiMn 1/3 Ni 1/3 Co 1/3 O 2 is prepared and characterized. The theoretical capacity of layered composite (0.5Li 2 MnO 3 .0.5LiMn 1/3 Ni 1/3 Co 1/3 O 2 ) is about 378 mAh g -1 . 2 The electrochemical performance of a cathode material is influenced by its crystallinity, morphology, particle size and porosity. Porous electrode materials can facilitate flow of the electrolyte into core of particles leading to high rate capability of the material. Furthermore, they can also withstand mechanical stress generated by volume expansion/contraction cycles during charge-discharge cycling. In the present work, porous Li 1.2 Mn 0.53 Ni 0.13 Co 0.13 O 2 is prepared by inverse micro- emulsion route in the presence of a polymer template, which is generally known as pluronic acid or P123. 3 Physicochemical and electrochemical studies are conducted. The as synthesized samples are subjected to TGA, ICP-OES, powder XRD, SEM, TEM, N 2 gas adsorption/desorption, cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic charge- discharge cycling and rate capability studies. The BET surface area values of the as prepared samples at 500-900 o C are in the range of 10 - 2 m 2 /g. The pore size distributions of the samples are obtained at broadly distributed mesoporosity range (~10-50 nm). The porosity is attributed due to synthetic procedure adopted in the present work. Although the initial discharge capacity of the as prepared sample at 900 o C is 250 mAh g -1 , it is stabilized after 30 th cycle at about 230 mAh g -1 at current density of 40 mA g -1 . From the rate capability studies, a discharge capacity of about 115 mAh g -1 is obtained at 5C (c.d: 1A/g) rate. 4 The results of these studies will be presented. Acknowledgements: Authors thank Renault Nissan Technology Business Centre India Pvt. Ltd., Chennai for financial support for conducting this research. TRP thanks to University Grant Commission (UGC), Government of India for a senior research fellowship. References: 1. M.M. Thackeray, S.-H. Kang, C.S. Johnson, J.T. Vaughey, R. Benedek, S.A. Hackney, J. Mater. Chem. 2007, 17, 3112. 2. F. Amalraj, D. Kovacheva, M. Talianker, L. Zeri, J. Grinblat, N. Leifer, G. Goobes, B. Markovsky, and D. Aurbach, J. Electrochem. Soc., 2010, 157, A1121. 3. N.N. Sinha and N. Munichandraiah, ACS J. App. Mat. Interface. 2009, 6, 1241. 4. Tirupathi Rao Penki, D. Shanmughasundaram, A. V. Jeyaseelan, A. K. Subramani and N. Munichandraiah, J. Electrochem. Soc., 2014, 161, A33.