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Abstract Lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) are primary energy storage devices to power consumer electronics and electric vehicles, but their capacity is dramatically decreased at ultrahigh charging/discharging rates. This mainly originates from a high Li‐ion/electron transport barrier within a traditional electrode, resulting in reaction polarization issues. To address this limitation, a functionally layer‐graded electrode was designed and fabricated to decrease the charge carrier transport barrier within the electrode. As a proof‐of‐concept, functionally layer‐graded electrodes composing of TiO 2 (B) and reduced graphene oxide (RGO) exhibit a remarkable capacity of 128 mAh g −1 at a high charging/discharging rate of 20 C (6.7 A g −1 ), which is much higher than that of a traditionally homogeneous electrode (74 mAh g −1 ) with the same composition. This is evidenced by the improvement of effective Li ion diffusivity as well as electronic conductivity in the functionally layer‐graded electrodes.
Zhang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.