Graphene decorated polymeric flexible materials for lightweight high areal energy lithium-ion batteries

Abstract High energy density lightweight batteries are required to revolutionize the future electronics and electric vehicles, thus, a lightweight and flexible material having the ability to carry high energy is the need of the hour. Herein, we have used laser-induced graphene foam (LIGF), grown at polyimide, directly as a self-sustaining binder-free anode material for lithium-ion batteries. The migration of the electrons on the LIGF grown finally on the one side of polyimide makes it possible to directly implant as a device, for a proof of concept, a folded specimen of LIGF is used as an anode. The initial areal capacity of ∼203 μAhcm−2 for as-grown LIGF increases to 280 μA hcm−2 upon annealing at 400 °C because of the improved graphitization. Stable rate performance is observed for 100 cycles at a current density of 0.1 mAcm−1 with average Coulombic efficiency of 99%. The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy hint that the conductivity of the annealed specimen is increased subsequently favors faster electronic flow on the one side of a non-conducting polymer. The present study paves a path towards future LIGF based lightweight lithium-ion batteries and also enables flexible wearable high energy density storage devices.