Sintered Porous Tellurium Pellet Lithium Battery Electrodes

Abstract

Thick sintered porous tellurium pellets are fabricated and evaluated as cathodes in lithium–tellurium batteries. These electrodes lack inactive binders and conductive additives and have very high areal capacity, which are important attributes for increasing cell energy density. More commonly tellurium in lithium–tellurium batteries is processed via melt impregnation into a conductive host. In contrast, herein, porous sintered electrodes comprising only tellurium material dramatically increase the areal active material loading to 150 mg cm−2 compared to the typically reported <5 mg cm−2. A processing route is used on the tellurium powder to reduce the particle size and increase the electroactive area by a factor of 13. With the increased surface area, gravimetric capacity increased for the same current density and retention of capacity at increasing rates has even greater improvement. Thick all active material–sintered tellurium electrodes provide a route toward high volumetric energy density batteries, where the relatively high electronic conductivity of tellurium is expected to be beneficial due to the lack of conductive additives in the electrode system.