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Research Letters in Physical Chemistry
Volume 2007, Article ID 32528, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2007/32528
Research Letter

Anisotropic Vanadium Oxide Nanostructured Host Matrices for Lithium Ion Intercalation

C. O'Dwyer,1 V. Lavayen,1,2 M. A. Santa Ana,2 E. Benavente,3 G. González,2 and C. M. Sotomayor Torres1,4,5

1Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
2Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
3Department of Chemistry, Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile
4Institute for Research and Advanced Studies, ICREA, Barcelona 08010, Spain
5Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Edifici CM7, Bellaterra, Barcelona 08193, Spain

Received 26 June 2007; Accepted 6 August 2007

Academic Editor: David L. Andrews

Copyright © 2007 C. O'Dwyer et al. 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

We report on unique high-volume low-dimensional V2O5-based turbostratic nanostructures, prepared using sol-gel synthetic methods from V2O5⋅nH2O xerogels. Electrochemical intercalation of Li+ to form Li0.65V2O5 resulted in a maximum measured charge capacity of 1225 mAh g−1 as the β-LixV2O5 phase. Conductivities of the order of 10−3 S cm−1 were found on compressed-nanotube parallelepipedal samples, which exhibit an anisotropy factor of 70 at room temperature by preferential alignment of the nanotubes. The improved electrochemical properties observed in novel vanadium oxide nanostructured arrays are attributed to the increased volumetric density for ion intercalation, shorter diffusion paths to the intercalation sites, and a high degree of crystallinity of the individual nanotubular host structures.