Scientists from the Czech Advance Technology and Research Institute (CATRIN) of Palacký University, in collaboration with VSB-Technical University of Ostrava and Saarland University in Germany, developed a new anode for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) based on a graphene acid (GA)—a densely carboxylated graphene derivative.

The new anode outperforms previously reported anode materials of this family and could store electric charge significantly better even than a high-quality monolayer graphene. The results were published in the prestigious journal for energy research Advanced Energy Materials.

“Aromatic carboxylic acids are stable and high-energy organic LIB anode materials owing to their low reduction potential and coordination ability towards lithium. Yet, these molecules are non-conductive and soluble in the electrolytes of the batteries. For this reason, their advantages cannot be translated into practice yet. Graphene acid helped us to overcome most of these challenges,” said Ievgen Obraztsov, the first author of the article.

“The high performance is attributed to the conductivity of GA, very high among the family of densely functionalized graphenes, as well as to the binding proclivity of Li ions to the carboxylic groups, which electronically communicate with the graphene backbone,” explained Aristides Bakandritsos, who is one of the main authors of the work.

“The results demonstrate the possibility of developing very efficient battery materials using such effective chemistry that enables to install on graphene suitable chemical groups at high density for interacting with the energy carriers,” added Michal Otyepka from CATRIN-RCPTM and IT4Innovations.

“It is hard to imagine our life today without batteries as the demand constantly grows. The performance of graphene acid is indeed appealing and our society needs such advances to meet other challenges in the future. With the related raw materials in LIBs becoming critical, an important aspect of the work is that the developed versatile chemistry can lead to new avenues for identifying materials for post-Lithium energy storage, which will be one of the main directions of CATRIN-RCPTM’s research in the next years,” concluded Radek Zboril, Scientific Director of CATRIN-RCPTM.