VOPO4 polymorphs as Li/Na-ion battery cathodes
Paul’s paper titled “Comparison of the polymorphs of VOPO4 as multi-electron cathodes for rechargeable alkali-ion batteries” has just been published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A. In collaboration with the Whittingham group, we performed a systematic first principles investigation, supported by careful electrochemical characterization and published experimental data, of the relative thermodynamic stability, voltage, band gap, and diffusion kinetics for alkali intercalation into the β, ε and αI polymorphs of VOPO4, a highly promising family of multi-electron cathodes. We identify the β polymorph as the most promising for Li insertion, and the αI polymorph as the most promising for Na insertion. We show that differences in the voltage, kinetics and rate capability of these different polymorphs for Li and Na insertion can be traced back to their fundamentally different VO6/VO5–PO4 frameworks.
