Furthering our previously developed graphite synthesis technique, our group has demonstrated control over properties of graphite and graphite agglomerates in order to produce graphite tailor made to the application. We have shown that the shape of the starting material is retained during our synthesis process and subsequently shown that by controlling that starting shape we can control the resulting graphite morphology of the agglomerates allowing these agglomerates to be engineered from, for example, malleable biomass. This is in addition to control over the crystal flake size of the graphite itself. Not only does this contrast with commercial techniques of graphite agglomerate shaping and control that lead to large, ~70%, loss but enables smaller scale research to produce graphite of Lithium-ion grade with controllable size, porosity, and shape for use in development of next generation anode materials such as Si/Graphite composites. Our process can be easily tuned to match the performance of commercial Li-ion graphite (see below) without the environmental destruction and cost of current commercial Li-ion battery graphite production. Our process could provide the graphite needed to meet rapidly growing (500% increase predicted) needs to enable widespread electric vehicle adoption to become a reality without adding to the environmental damage of vast mining expansion.
We have published a paper on the subject that can be found at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11853-x
