Research on Modification of Graphite Anode Materials for Lithium-Ion Batteries

Although graphite anodes are currently dominating the lithium- ion battery market due to their structural stability and cost-effectiveness, they are also prone to lithium plating, interfacial side reactions, and drastic loss in capacity at extreme operating conditions, i.e. ultrafast charging and low temperature, and hence cannot be used in high-power energy storage applications. The change strategies in this review are critically addressed with modifications like: heteroatom doping, surface coating and structural/morphological engineering with emphasis to the governing mechanisms on the bulk, interface and particle level. The effectiveness and natural limitations of every approach towards the enhancement of rate capacity and cycling stability are evaluated systematically. It is emphasized that not even single-modification strategies are practicable to achieve all four attributes that are high capacity, high initial Coulombic efficiency, excellent rate performance and long-term cycling stability. Instead, a synergistic diet of co-engineering of bulk-interface-morphology comes out as one of the major solutions to solve these trade-offs. Recent works show that multiscale integration of these strategies effectively suppresses lithium plating and enhances cycling stability under extreme conditions (e.g., -20 °C or 10C), offering design insights for high-performance graphite anodes tailored for such operations.