The Capacity and Durability of Amorphous Silicon Nanotube Thin Film Anode for Lithium Ion Battery Applications

In this communication, we report that a silicon nanotube thin film electrode with 0.6 mg loading exhibited an initial discharge capacity of 4766 mAh g(-1) and retained about 3400 mAh g(-1) after 20.cycles at 100 mA g(-1) rate. The silicon nanotube thin film samples with thicknesses ranging from 10-28 microns were prepared using silicon deposition on bulk produced zinc oxide nanowire films and subsequent removal of zinc oxide cores. The developed silicon nanostructures exhibit tubular geometry with both open ends. The nanotubes with thin walls are shown to accommodate large volume changes with lithiation and exhibit stable capacity retention. The presence of hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) is shown to be essential for the silicon nanotube thin film performance for lithium ion battery applications. (C) The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.