Structural, magnetic and electrochemical studies on LiCo0.5Fe0.5O2

LiCo_0.5Fe_0.5O₂ was prepared by sol–gel method. The sample had spinel, cubic and hexagonal phases up to 873 K and a single hexagonal phase above 1,073 K. The magnetic properties were studied at room temperature and at 77 K. The large coercivities observed for the samples annealed at 1,073 and 1,273 K show that these samples do not exhibit a simple antiferromagnetic ordering. From the Mössbauer and magnetization measurements, it is concluded that the hexagonal phase is only an antiferromagnet. The above results clearly demonstrate that the simple aqueous-based sol–gel process developed in this work provides a viable method to synthesize the fine cuboidal particles that display discharge capacity as high as ≈165 mAh/g, which is higher than the value obtained by M. Holzapfel et al. (Holzapfel M, Schreiner R, Ott A, Electrochim Acta 46:1063, 2001) for their samples synthesized by using the ion exchange method. This work suggests that the approaches based on solution chemistry are viable processes for synthesizing good quality electrode material.