Summary: | Engineering design of battery configurations and new battery system development are alternative approaches to achieve high performance batteries. A novel flexible and ultra-light graphite anode is fabricated by simple friction drawing on filter paper with a commercial 8B pencil. Compared with the traditional anode using copper foil as current collector, this innovative current-collector-free design presents capacity improvement of over 200% by reducing the inert weight of the electrode. The as-prepared pencil-trace electrode exhibits excellent rate performance in potassium-ion batteries (KIBs), significantly better than in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), with capacity retention of 66% for the KIB vs. 28% for the LIB from 0.1 to 0.5 A gâ1. It also shows a high reversible capacity of â¼230 mAh gâ1 at 0.2 A gâ1, 75% capacity retention over 350 cycles at 0.4 A gâ1and the highest rate performance (based on the total electrode weight) among graphite electrodes for K+ storage reported so far. Keywords: Current-collector-free, Flexible pencil-trace electrode, Potassium-ion battery, Lithium-ion battery, Layer-by-layer interconnected architecture
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