Abstract
The achievement of energy storage and return of energy supply is crucial for several applications (EVs, cellphones, laptops). Thick electrodes with minimized inactive materials in the overall battery can improve the energy density of lithium ion batteries. Spark Plasma Sintering is an advanced densification technique has been used to prepare thick electrodes in minutes. The templating approach is adopted for preparing porous electrodes with interconnected well-controlled pore sizes and morphologies. Here, sodium chloride microsize particles are used as a templating agent to create pores inside the thick electrodes. These sintered binder-free electrodes are self-supported that helps to increase the energy density of lithium ion batteries. The electrochemical performances of half and full batteries reveal a remarkable specific areal capacity (20 mA h cm−2), which is 4 times higher than those of 100 μm thick electrodes present in conventional tape-casted Li–ion batteries (5 mA h cm−2). The 3D morphological study is carried out by micro computed tomography to obtain tortuosity values and pore size distributions leading to a strong correlation with their electrochemical properties. These results demonstrate that the coupling between the salt templating method and the spark plasma sintering is also applied for thick electrodes fabrication using other active materials and also different cell configurations are proposed