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Published January 2017 | Published
Journal Article Open

Reversible Capacity of Conductive Carbon Additives at Low Potentials: Caveats for Testing Alternative Anode Materials for Li-Ion Batteries

Abstract

The electrochemical performance of alternative anode materials for Li-ion batteries is often measured using composite electrodes consisting of active material and conductive carbon additives. Cycling of these composite electrodes at low voltages demonstrates charge storage at the operating potentials of viable anodes, however, the conductive carbon additive is also able to store charge in the low potential regime. The contribution of the conductive carbon additives to the observed capacity is often neglected when interpreting the electrochemical performance of electrodes. To provide a reference for the contribution of the carbons to the observed capacity, we report the charge storage behavior of two common conductive carbon additives Super P and Ketjenblack as a function of voltage, rate, and electrolyte composition. Both carbons exhibit substantial capacities after 100 cycles, up to 150 mAh g^(−1), when cycled to 10 mV. The capacity is dependent on the discharge cutoff voltage and cycling rate with some dependence on electrolyte composition. The first few cycles are dominated by the formation of the SEI followed by a fade to a steady, reversible capacity thereafter. Neglecting the capacity of the carbon additive can lead to significant errors in the estimation of charge storage capabilities of the active material.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2016. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-ND, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is not changed in any way and is properly cited. For permission for commercial reuse, please email: oa@electrochem.org. Manuscript submitted November 2, 2016. Revised manuscript received December 15, 2016. Published December 29, 2016. K. A. S. acknowledges Fred Wudl for helpful discussions. K. A. S. acknowledges graduate fellowship support from the ConvEne IGERT Program of the National Science Foundation (DGE 0801627) and postdoctoral funding from the St. Elmo Brady Future Faculty Postdoctoral Fellowship. The experiments were performed in Materials Research Laboratory facilities at UCSB, supported by the MRSEC Program of the NSF under grant No. DMR 1121053. M. A. L. thanks the RISE program (NSF DMR 1121053) for support. C. P. G. thanks the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Vehicle Technologies of the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, under the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) Program subcontract #7057154 for support.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 18, 2023