FABRICATION OF SILICON/CARBON NANO TUBE COMPOSITE ANODE USING HIGH-ENERGY BALL MILLING FOR LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES

• Main Author: Muhammad Firdaus, Arief
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/65488
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs) are secondary batteries with an outstanding combination of high energy and power density. These make LIBs have a lot of applications such as portable devices and electric vehicles. However, conventional LIBs still need a lot of improvement for high-capacity demanding applications despite their performance. One of the ways is to use silicon as an anode material with significantly higher specific energy, up to 4200 mAh/g, compared to graphite as the current anode material with a limited capacity of 372 mAh/g. However, silicon as an anode still suffers from drawbacks, such as massive volume expansion, low lithium diffusion coefficient, and low electrical conductivity. Carbon nanotube as carbonaceous material with superior mechanical properties, ability to transfer lithium-ion, and high electrical conductivity can be added to improve the performance of the silicon anode. In this work, a silicon-based composite anode with a carbon nanotube is synthesized using ball-milling as a simple and low-cost top-down method from an n-type silicon wafer. The as-milled silicon powder has an average size of 400 nm. As confirmed by SEM, the silicon/carbon nanotube (Si/CNT) composite is successfully prepared with silicon particles embedded in a carbon nanotube matrix. The cycling test shows an increasing performance of the half-cell LIB with Si/CNT composite electrode compared to silicon only. Si/CNT able to retain 85.53% of its initial capacity of 2469.75 mAh/g after 50 cycles. Furthermore, the Si/CNT electrode also shows a higher rate capability than the silicon-only electrode.