Enabling high rate charge and discharge capability, low internal resistance, and excellent cycleability for Li-ion batteries utilizing graphene additives.

A liquid-phase mixing method is adopted to uniformly disperse the graphene nanosheets onto LiNi 1/3 Co 1/3 Mn 1/3 O 2 cathode for high-performance Li-ion batteries (LIBs). The electrochemical performance was characterized using a full pouch cells with state-of-the-art electrode areal loading (compared to half coin cells). The addition of graphene sheets (i.e., only 1 wt%) significantly improves the high rate capability for charging and discharging operation. For example, 6 times improvement in 5  C charging was achieved providing further insights in enabling extreme fast charging for LIBs. Other benefits include longer cycleability, lower internal resistance, and higher lithium ion diffusion coefficient, demonstrated by charge-discharge cycling tests and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Higher capacity retention of 88.2% and decreased internal resistance of ∼0.9 Ω are observed after 400 cycles. The diffusion coefficient of Li ions is 6.49 × 10 −8  cm 2  s −1 when charged to 4.2 V, which is approximately 1.37 times higher compared to the configuration with no graphene sheet (4.74 × 10 −8  cm 2  s −1 ). The improved performance is ascribed to a robust network among the active materials formed by graphene sheets, which serves as an extended current conductor and facilitates charge transfer, ionic reversibility, and ionic transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]