New families of materials of cathode materials for Li-ion batteries, with greater capacities, are required to more effectively meet the worlds energy storage demands. Li-excess, cation disordered materials such as Li1.25Nb0.25Mn0.5O2 and Li1.3Nb0.43Ni0.27O2 have shown promise as materials with significantly higher capacities than their layered counterparts and allow for a broad compositional range. However the nature of the long- and short-range cation ordering (or disordering) within these materials is not yet well understood. We propose to carry out high-quality total neutron scattering on several samples of these disordered compounds to determine both the local and long-range ordering present in these important battery materials.
