Co3O4/RGO Nanoparticles Fabricated by Facile Solvothermal Method as an Anode Material for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Batteries

A potential anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), Co3O4 has been widely considered by many scholars because of its excellent properties in terms of electrochemical characteristics and theoretical specific capacity. However, according to the existing research results, we found that the improvement of the electrochemical performance of Co3O4 has encountered a bottleneck because its intrinsic conductivity is not high enough, and more importantly, the volume expansion is too significant during the charge and discharge process, which leads to the material structure breaking. Therefore, this paper proposes a simple and scalable solvothermal and subsequent calcination method to prepare Co3O4 and reduced graphene oxide (RGO) composite nanoparticles with superior microstructures, and their morphological and electrochemical properties were investigated at different calcination temperatures. As a high-performance anode material for lithium-ion batteries, the Co3O4/RGO nanoparticles obtained at 550 degrees C exhibited terrific initial discharge capacity of 1714.2 mAh g(-1), the reversible specific capacity of 1191.9 mAh g(-1) with quality coulombic efficiency 98.17 % at 0.5 A g(-1) after 100 cycles and extraordinary rate performance (907.6 mAh g(-1) with a coulombic efficiency of 99.2 % at 2 A g(-1)). The facile synthesis method and excellent findings have led to better application prospects for Co3O4/RGO nanoparticles.