Carbon materials for lithium-ion rechargeable batteries

Abstract The recent development of lithium rechargeable batteries results from the use of carbon materials as lithium reservoir at the negative electrode. Reversible intercalation, or insertion, of lithium into the carbon host lattice avoids the problem of lithium dendrite formation and provides large improvement in terms of cycleability and safety. This paper reviews the main achievements on performance and understanding of charge–discharge mechanisms, resulting from the tremendous activity devoted to these systems in the past few years. As a matter of fact, all carbon materials can be lithiated to a certain extent. However, the amount of lithium reversibly incorporated in the carbon lattice (the reversible capacity), the faradaic losses during the first charge–discharge cycle (the irreversible capacity), the profile of the voltage curves during charging and discharging, all depend on the structure, the texture and heteroatom content of the carbon material. In this paper, we successively examine the electrochemical behaviour of the main families of materials, namely, natural and synthetic graphites, graphitizable carbons, low-temperature and non-graphitizing carbons, and doped carbons.