Recently, many efforts have been made in order to develop advanced anode materials in lithium ion batteries (LIBs). Particularly, transition-metal oxides, such as TiO 2 , Fe 2 O 3 , CoO and WO 3-x , have been intensively investigated as promising anode candidates for LIBs. It has been reported that such materials have the merits as anodes in LIB, such as cheap material cost, high capacity and high material density.
1Because of intrinsically low electric conductivity of these metal oxides, however, nanocomposite formation with carbon has been tried in order to provide better electrical pathway through carbon phase. 2,17,19,20 Especially, nanocomposites between transient metal oxides and ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) have become more attractive due to their beneficial characteristics: i) abundant lithium storage sites and fast lithium diffusion in nanosized metal oxides and OMC; ii) facile electrolyte penetration owing to ordered mesopores iii) higher electric conductivity through carbon framework. 2,17,19,20 As a novel metal-oxide anode candidate, molybdenum oxides (MoO x , x = 2-3), which possess a theoretical specific capacity of 840-1100 mAh g -1 based on the mechanism of conversion reaction, have attracted considerable interest as anode material materials in LIBs.3,4 However, it has been elucidated that in bulk MoO x electrodes, only addition-type lithium storage reaction happens rather than conversion reaction, which leads to quite limited specific capacity and their intrinsically low electric and ionic conductivity retards their rate performance.4,5 Accordingly, nanostructured MoO x anodes of various forms (nanobelts, nanorods and nanoporous structures) have been prepared and great improvement has been observed. [4][5][6] Particularly, the ordered mesoporous MoO 2 templated from the KIT-6 silica has been reported, which exhibited largely enhanced anode performance. 5 Nevertheless, the employed preparation was based on the high-cost and environmentally unfriendly hard templating method, which required multi-step procedures including the hazardous hydrofluoric acid etching. Furthermore, a mesoporous carbon-MoO 2 nanocomposite has been recently prepared by the traditional post-addition method.7 Although better electrochemical performance was observed, this preparative method was still tedious and more importantly, the post-added metal precursors were difficult to be localized in the inner pores during a high-temperature calcination, which resulted in crystal aggregation and relatively inhomogeneous dispersion of MoO 2 within the OMC matrix.7 Triconstituent co-assembly, which utilizes the strong molecular interaction between carbon precursor, inorganic precursor and surfactants, has been recognized as an attractive strategy to prepare the OMC/various transient metal oxide composites within one step. 8 In our previous work, triconstituent co-assembly method has been successfully employed to prepare OMC/MoO 2 nanocomposite, namely triconstituent ordered mesoporous carbon-MoO 2 nanocomposites
