Low Temperature Sonochemical Synthesis of Morphology Variable MoO₃ Nanostructures for Performance Enhanced Lithium Ion Battery Applications

We report a low temperature facile approach to control the nanostructure morphologies of molybdenum oxide (MoO₃) for high performance lithium ion batteries (LIBs). Nanorods and nanoflowers of MoO₃ can be obtained by simply controlling the acidity of the precursor solution during sonication. We have found that the nanostructures play a key role in determining the performance of LIBs. Particularly, the LIB with MoO₃ nanoflowers as the anode can achieve a specific capacity up to 1020 mAh g^-1 at a discharge current density of 550 mA g^-1. This capacity is close to the theoretical limit and is among the highest reported with MoO₃-based anodes, it suggests the nanostructures is efficient for ion intercalation during the charge and discharge processes. The LIBs using the MoO₃ nanoflower anode also show superior cycling performance; 78% of the maximum capacity can be retained even after 100 charge/discharge cycles. Since the presented low-cost and simple synthesis approach can be easily implemented in large scale, it has a large potential for the application of high performance lithium ion batteries.