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Active and Passive Electronic Components
Volume 18 (1995), Issue 1, Pages 61-68
doi:10.1155/1995/83138

Reversible Electrochemical Insertion of Lithium in Fine Grained Polycrystalline Powders of SnO2

S. D. Han,1 S. Y. Huang,1 G. Campet,1,3 S. H. Pulcinnelli,2 and C. V. Santilli2

1Laboratoire de Chimie du Solide du CNRS, Université Bordeaux I, 351 cours de la Libération, Talence Cedex 33405, France
2Universidade Estadual Paulista, Instituto de Quimica, CP.355-CEP., Araraquara 14800-900, SP, Brazil
3Institut de Chemie de la Matièra Condensée de Bordeaux, CNRS, Université Bordeaux I, Chateau Brivazac, Ave du Dr. A. Schweitzer, Pessac 33600, France

Received 20 November 1994; Accepted 30 November 1994

Copyright © 1995 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Fine grained SnO2 powders have been obtained using an unconventional method. It deals with the well known polymerization method starting from the metallic halide SnCl4 with polyethylene oxide (PEO). With this method, SnO2 powders, which are free from water and hydroxyl group contaminations and possess small crystallite size (≈50 A∘), are obtained by appropriate pyrolysis of the polymer. Consequently, these powders show good ability to insert reversibly lithium ions in the Li/Li+/LixSnO2 cell. Indeed, by minimizing the size of the crystallites, the formation of defect-bonds is favored, particularly at the crystallite surface, acting as reversible (de)grafting sites of Li+. Finally, an easy-to-carry out method to determine the chemical diffusion coefficient of lithium has been proposed.