| Abstract Scope |
Polycrystalline lithium nickel cobalt manganese oxide (LiNixCoyMn1-x-yO2, NCM) ceramics have emerged as promising lithium intercalation materials due to their high capacity, good cycling stability, and excellent thermal resilience. These properties make NCM ceramics popular for lithium battery cathodes. However, conventional fabrication methods such as powder metallurgy suffer from expenses, time consumption, and limitations in customizing structures. This study introduces a novel approach to fabricating NCM ceramics with 3D free-form structures. Sol-gel synthesis produces photocurable colloidal solutions, while a home-built micro-continuous liquid interface production system prints resins with varying ion concentrations (x and y) into 3D hydrogels. After thermal dehydration, debinding, and sintering, polycrystalline NCM ceramics with different atomic ratios of Ni, Mn and Co (NCM 111, NCM 811, and NCM 901) featuring distinguishable grains are successfully produced, demonstrating potential applications such as high-surface-area electrodes. |