Controlling the Lithium Intercalation Voltage in the Li(Mn1-xNix)₂O₄ Spinel via Tuning of the Ni Concentration: a Density Functional Theory Study

LiMn2O4 spinel is a promising cathode material for secondary lithium-ion batteries. Despite showing a high average voltage of lithium intercalation, the material is structurally unstable, undergoing lowering of the crystal symmetry due to Jahn-Teller distortion of the six-fold Mn3+ cations. Although Ni has been proposed as a suitable substitutional dopant to improve the structural stability of LiMn2O4 and enhance the average lithium intercalation voltage, the thermodynamics of the Ni incorporation and its effect on the electrochemical properties of this spinel material are not yet known. In this work, we have employed density functional theory calculations with a Hubbard Hamiltonian (DFT+u) to investigate the thermodynamics of cation mixing in the Li(Mn1_xNix)2O4 solid solution. Our results suggest LiMn1.5Ni0.5O4 is the most stable composition from room temperature up to at least 1000 K, in agreement with experiments. We also found that the configurational entropy is much lower than the maximum entropy at 1000 K, indicating that higher temperatures are required to reach a fully disordered solid solution. A maximum average lithium intercalation voltage of 4.8 eV was calculated for the LiMn1.5Ni0.5O4 composition, which is very close to the experimental value. The temperature was found to have a negligible effect on the Li intercalation voltage of the most stable composition. The findings reported here support the application of LiMn1.5Ni0.5O4 as a suitable cathode material for lithium-ion batteries, with a highly stable voltage of intercalation under a wide range of temperatures.