“…In addition, the synthetic method could have a significant influence on the electrochemical properties. So far, the LiMn 2 O 4 cathode materials have been obtained by a solid-state method [38,39], hydrothermal method [40,41], combustion method [31,42,43], co-precipitation method [44], sol-gel method [45,46,47], and so on. Among these methods, the sol-gel method is highly suitable to prepare the high-performance, doped LiMn 2 O 4 due to the following advantages: (1) the reactants are evenly mixed at the molecular level in the process of forming a gel; (2) uniform cation doping can be achieved due to the intimate mixing of chemical contents in a solution; and (3) the chemical reaction is carried out easily, because the diffusion of the components is on a nanometer scale, which requires relatively low synthetic temperature.…”