Facile synthesis of novel tunable highly porous CuO nanorods for high rate lithium battery anodes with realized long cycle life and high reversible capacity

Various CuO nanostructures have been well studied as anode materials for lithium ion batteries (LIBs); however, there are few reports on the synthesis of porous CuO nanostructures used for anode materials, especially one-dimensional (1D) porous CuO. In this work, novel 1D highly porous CuO nanorods with tunable porous size were synthesized in large-quantities by a new, friendly, but very simple approach. We found that the pore size could be controlled by adjusting the sintering temperature in the calcination process. With the rising of calcination temperature, the pore size of CuO has been tuned in the range of ∼0.4 nm to 22 nm. The porous CuO materials have been applied as anode materials in LIBs and the effects of porous size on the electrochemical properties were observed. The highly porous CuO nanorods with porous size in the range of ∼6 nm to 22 nm yielded excellent high specific capacity, good cycling stability, and high rate performance, superior to that of most reported CuO nanocomposites. The CuO material delivers a high reversible capacity of 654 mA h g−1 and 93% capacity retention over 200 cycles at a rate of 0.5 C. It also exhibits excellent high rate capacity of 410 mA h g−1 even at 6 C. These results suggest that the facile synthetic method of producing a tunable highly porous CuO nanostructure can realize a long cycle life with high reversible capacity, which is suitable for next-generation high-performance LIBs.