Fabrication of mesoporous metal oxide coated-nanocarbon hybrid materials via a polyol-mediated self-assembly process

After clarifying the formation mechanism of a typical metal glycolate precipitate, Ti glycolate, in a polyol-mediated synthesis using acetone as a precipitation medium, we describe a simple template-free approach based on an ethylene glycol-mediated synthesis to fabricate mesoporous metal oxide coated-nanocarbon hybrid materials including TiO₂ coated-carbon nanotube (CNT), SnO₂ coated-CNT, Cu₂O/CuO coated-CNT and TiO₂ coated-graphene sheet (GS). In the approach, metal oxide precursors, metal glycolates, were first deposited on CNTs or GSs, and subsequently transformed to the metal oxide coatings by pyrolysis or hydrolysis. By a comparison between the characterization of two TiO₂-CNT hybrid materials using carboxylated CNTs and pristine CNTs without carboxyl groups, the driving force for initiating the deposition of metal glycolates on the carboxylated CNTs is confirmed to be the hydrogen bonding between the carboxyl groups and the polymer chains in metal glycolate sols. The electrochemical performances of the mesoporous TiO₂ coated-carboxylated CNTs and TiO₂-pristine CNT hybrid materials were investigated. The results show that the mesoporous TiO₂ coated-carboxylated CNT with a uniform core-shell nanostructure exhibits substantial improvement in the rate performance in comparison with its counterpart from 0.5 C to 100 C because of its higher electronic conductivity and shorter diffusion path for the lithium ion. At the extremely high rate of 100 C, the specific capacity of TiO₂ of the former reaches 85 mA h g(-1), twice as high as that of the latter.