ORIGINAL PAPER Negative Electrode Comprised of Nanostructured CuO for Advanced Lithium Ion Batteries Manab Kundu 1,2 • Gopalu Karunakaran 2,3 • Evgeny Kolesnikov 2 • Mikhail V. Gorshenkov 4 • Denis Kuznetsov 2 Received: 19 December 2016 / Published online: 30 January 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Negative electrode comprised of CuO nanoparticles (CuO-NPs), with an average particle size of 50 nm have been successfully synthesized by simple and convenient chemical precipitation method. XRD, SEM, FTIR and TEM have been employed for physical characterization. The electrochemical performances have been evaluated by galvanostatic charge–discharge and cyclic voltammetry. During the cycling test at 200 mA g -1 , the CuO-NPs exhibited a stable discharge capacity of 516 mA h g -1 , with 84% capacity retention. This superior electrochemical performance of CuO-NPs is mainly attributed to the nano-dimension of the parti- cles, which benefit electron and Li ion transportation, with large electrode–elec- trolyte contact area. Keywords CuO-NPs Á Chemical precipitation Á Negative electrode Á Lithium ion battery Á Energy storage & Manab Kundu manab.kundu@ntnu.no; chemmanab@gmail.com & Gopalu Karunakaran karunakarang5@misis.ru; karunakarang5@gmail.com 1 Present Address: Department of Material Science and Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway 2 Department of Functional Nanosystems and High-Temperature Materials, National University of Science and Technology ‘‘MISiS’’, Leninskiy Pr. 4, Moscow, Russia 119049 3 Department of Biotechnology, K. S. Rangasamy College of Arts and Science, Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu 637215, India 4 Department of Physical Materials Science, National University of Science and Technology ‘‘MISiS’’, Leninskiy Pr. 4, Moscow, Russia 119049 123 J Clust Sci (2017) 28:1595–1604 DOI 10.1007/s10876-017-1170-8