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L. He, Z. Zhao / Journal of Alloys and Compounds 688 (2016) 386e391
Scheme 1. The process of chemical reaction in co-precipitation synthesis.
concentration may be more efficient. For example, when the Liþ
concentration increase 10 times, the product value of
[Liþ]3 ꢂ [PO34ꢀ] will increase by an exponent of three, i.e. 1000
times, which is much bigger comparing with the case of increasing
the concentration of H3PO4 (10 times). So when the concentration
product of Liþ and PO43ꢀ becomes above the critical value of Ksp1, the
reaction (2) is balanced to keep equilibrium by encouraging the
reaction from the right to the left side, and then accelerate the
Li3PO4 precipitation.
surface was rough (Fig. 7c).
4. Discussion
In the prior literature, researches synthesized LiFePO4 via co-
precipitation route or other solution chemistry method
constantly emphasised that pure LiFePO4 only can be prepared at
neutral or slightly basic conditions. Therefore, the molar ratio of the
starting materials which contain Li, Fe, P resources was always to be
LiOH:Fe2þ:H3PO4 ¼ 3:1:1. Under this conditions, triple amount of
LiOH can react with H3PO4 completely, obtaining a neutral or
slightly basic solution with the pH value 7e9. During this process,
excess-LiOH was generally reckoned as a pH adjuster.
In fact, this is not entirely true. From the three comparison ex-
periments illustrated in Figs. 3, 5 and 6, we can see that it was hard
for us to synthesize pure LiFePO4 product by using the stoichio-
metric starting materials of FeSO4$7H2O, LiOH$H2O and o-H3PO4
(Li:Fe:P ¼ 1:1:1) at pH 4e10, and the situation was similar in the
case of Li:Fe:P ¼ 1:1:3. However, pure and well-crystallized LiFePO4
particles can be prepared at the Li:Fe:P molar ratio 3:1:1 and pH
7e9.
According to the results of the XRD, the obtained product is
different under different pH and Li: Fe: P molar ratio conditions.
Therefore, we can roughly calculate the chemical reaction process
according to the results of the XRD. In this work, the precipitation
processes were based on the LiOHeFeSO4eH3PO4eH2O system.
Fe3(PO4)2$8H2O was prepared as the first intermediate precipitate
by adding LiOH to an aqueous solution of FeSO4 and H3PO4
(3 < pH < 6). When an excess of LiOH was introduced to the
equilibration solution of Fe3(PO4)2$8H2O precipitate with an
enough amount of free ions of Liþ and PO43ꢀ, the second interme-
diate Li3PO4 precipitated in the form of small particles on the sur-
face of the pre-formed Fe3(PO4)2$8H2O particles at neutral or
slightly basic conditions (6 < pH < 10). The chemical reaction can be
generally written as equation (4), with the processes being shown
in Scheme 1.
Fig. 6 showed the XRD patterns of particles obtained after the
LiOH concentration being improved from 0.3 mol Lꢀ1 to 0.9 mol Lꢀ1
,
with the molar ratio Li:Fe:P ¼ 3:1:1. The results demonstrated that
both LiFePO4 and Fe3(PO4)2 were discovered at pH 4.5. In addition,
the impurities Fe2O3 and Li3CO3 were yielded under strong basic
solution (Fig. 6d). Remarkably, a single phase and well-crystallized
LiFePO4 sample was obtained at pH 7e9 (Fig. 6b and c), indicating
an efficient improvement on Li3PO4 precipitation via maintaining
an excess of LiOH in the solution. Furthermore, the SEM images of
the samples was displayed Fig. 7, with diamond-shaped particles
being those of LiFePO4. It can be seen that the particle morphology
changed depending on the solution pH values. At pH ¼ 4.5, the
morphology of the particles was random-irregular, no diamond-
shaped one was discovered (Fig. 7a). It could be attributed to
mixed crystal phenomenon by LiFePO4 and Fe3(PO4)2, i.e. in the
sintering process, the intermediates Fe3(PO4)2$8H2O and Li3PO4
will react with each other to form LiFePO4 phase, and the excess
Fe3(PO4)2$8H2O will dehydrate to generate Fe3(PO4)2. Because
LiFePO4 and Fe3(PO4)2 have different crystalline structures, and
both of them can be regarded as an impurity for each other. So it is
easy to occur a crystal form blending and inhibit the growth and
formation of LiFePO4 and Fe3(PO4)2 crystals, resulting a random-
irregular morphology of the particles. With the pH value
increasing to 6.7, the morphology of the samples became diamond-
shaped, and the surface of the particles was smooth, indicating a
good crystallization (Fig. 7b). In the case of pH ¼ 8.9, the
morphology still kept a diamond shape, but by contrast the particle