How the Negative Electrode Influences Interfacial and Electrochemical Properties of LiNi_1/3Co_1/3Mn_1/3O₂Cathodes in Li-Ion Batteries

The cycle life of LiNi 1/3 Co 1/3 Mn 1/3 O 2 (NMC) based cells are significantly influenced by the choice of the negative electrode. Electrochemical testing and post mortem surface analysis are here used to investigate NMC electrodes cycled vs . either Li-metal, graphite or Li 4 Ti 5 O 12 (LTO) as negative electrodes. While NMC-LTO and NMC-graphite cells show small capacity fading over 200 cycles, NMC-Li-metal cell suffers from rapid capacity fading accompanied with an increased voltage hysteresis despite the almost unlimited access of lithium. X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) results show that no structural degradation occurs on the positive electrode even after >200 cycles, however, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results shows that the composition of the surface layer formed on the NMC cathode in the NMC-Li-metal cell is largely different from that of the other NMC cathodes (cycled in the NMC-graphite or NMC-LTO cells). Furthermore, it is shown that the surface layer thickness on NMC increases with the number of cycles, caused by continuous electrolyte degradation products formed at the Li-metal negative electrode and then transferred to NMC positive electrode.