Aluminum has excellent intrinsic properties as an anode material for lithium ion batteries, while this application is significantly underappreciated. Due to the high chemical reactivity of Al, bottom-up preparation of Al nanostructures is very challenging and Al based anode with high capacity and good stability is extremely challenging. In this work, we developed a plasma method to address the synthetic challenge. Using AlCl3-H2-CH4 plasma with the addition of low amount of FeCl3, a homogeneous Al-Fe/C nanocomposite with uniform particle size around 40 nm is obtained at near room temperature. The low pressure glow discharge plasma generates highly reactive intermediates such as AlCl and H radicals, which allows direct reduction of AlCl3 to metal Al in mild conditions. The plasma enabled reaction leads to performance breakthrough of the Al based anode materials, which suggests that Al should be more seriously considered as a promising candidate anode material for LIBs.

铝具有出色的内在特性，可作为锂离子电池的负极材料，而这种应用却被人们严重忽视。由于铝的高化学反应性，铝纳米结构的自下而上的制备非常具有挑战性，而具有高容量和良好稳定性的铝基阳极则极具挑战性。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种等离子体方法来应对合成挑战。使用添加少量FeCl3的AlCl3-H2-CH4等离子体，可以在接近室温的条件下获得均质Al-Fe / C纳米复合材料，其颗粒尺寸均在40 nm左右。低压辉光放电等离子体产生高反应性的中间体，例如AlCl和H自由基，这使AlCl3在温和条件下直接还原为金属Al。