Preparation and lithium storage properties of C@TiO2/3D carbon hollow sphere skeleton composites

Abstract Rational design and facile synthesis of hybrid TiO2 anode materials with high electrical conductivity and ionic accessibility are urgently desired to construct high performance litium-ion batteries. In this work, We first utilize conductive hollow porous pollen carbon microsphere as skeleton to load C@TiO2 nanoparticles. The C@TiO2/3D pollen carbon (CTPC) composite with hollow porous structure has been successfully developed via a simple method. As a result, CTPC-700 (calcination temperature of 700 °C) electrode material exhibits superior electrochemical performance for lithium ion batteries, delivering an outstanding specific capacity of 148 mA h g−1 up to 1000 cycles at 5.0C and a superior high-rate performance of 112 mA h g−1 at 10.0C. Therefore, the special structure of the as-prepared composites can improve the stability of the electrode and enhance its electrochemical performance, which is promising for the next-generation of lithium-ion batteries.