Novel design of Fe3O4/hollow graphene spheres composite for high performance lithium-ion battery anodes

On account of its high theoretical capacity and low cost, Fe3O4 is regarded as a promising anode material for lithium-ion batteries. Nevertheless, many problems such as poor conductivity and volume expansion during lithiation severely limit its practical application. In this work, we synthesized hollow graphene spheres (HGSs) by self-assembly and innovatively combined it with Fe3O4 particles to obtain a composite material. The Fe3O4/HGSs composite exhibits excellent electrochemical performances as an anode material, which behaves an initial discharge specific capacity of 1670.8 mA h g(-1) at 50 mA g(-1) and 1048.5 mA h g(-1) after 50 cycles. Especially, the specific capacity can maintain as high as 617.1 mA h g(-1) at the current density of 1000 mA g(-1), which is much higher than that of commercial graphite. While largely inhibiting agglomeration between the particles of Fe3O4 particles, hollow spheres composed of conductive and flexible graphene layers also provide an interconnected conductive network. We believe that this design in structure will also provide a new perspective for the researches of other transition metal oxides for lithium-ion batteries. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.