Porous NiO/Ni foam electrode is fabricated by a simple two-step method. Firstly, nickel hydroxide hydrate nanoflakes are deposited on Ni foam via a chemical liquid deposition (CLD) method. Then NiO/Ni architecture is obtained by subsequent graft growth in air atmosphere at 350 degrees C. Galvanostatic battery testing shows that NiO electrode exhibits fine capacity retention and good rate performance. It exhibits high initial discharge and charge capacity of 1.94 and 1.36 mAh cm(-2), maintaining of 1.41 and 1.38 mAh cm(-2) after 140 cycles under a discharge/charge rate of 0.4 C. It delivers high discharge capacity retention of 70% (comparing with that of 0.2 C) even at a high rate of 2.5 C. After that, the discharge capacity can gradually resume along with the decrease of discharge/charge rate, showing capacity retention of 105% when lowering the discharge/charge rate to 0.2 C. The fine electrochemical performance of NiO/Ni is due to the maintenance of porous architecture and the prevention of active nano-sized NiO from aggregation in cycling, which is relevant to both the interweaved structure of NiO nanoflakes and the graft growth between NiO and Ni. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.