First-principles study of Li ion diffusion in LiFePO4 -: art. no. 104303

The diffusion mechanism of Li ions in the olivine LiFePO4 is investigated from first-principles calculations. The energy barriers for possible spatial hopping pathways are calculated with the adiabatic trajectory method. The calculations show that the energy barriers running along the c axis are about 0.6, 1.2, and 1.5 eV for LiFePO4, FePO4, and Li0.5FePO4, respectively. However, the other migration pathways have much higher energy barriers resulting in very low probability of Li-ion migration. This means that the diffusion in LiFePO4 is one dimensional. The one-dimensional diffusion behavior has also been shown with full ab initio molecular dynamics simulation, through which the diffusion behavior is directly observed.