Carbonization Procedure Towards Highly Conductive Paper Electrodes

Abstract

A new carbonization process is here proposed for the production of highly conductive, self-standing Li-ion battery electrodes. In such a procedure, the paper electrodes obtained as shown in Chap. 6 (i.e., with truly natural microfibrillated cellulose as binder and a cellulose sheet as support) are treated at 600 °C in a furnace under nitrogen flux. In this way, both the MFC fibres and the FB sheet get carbonized; the resulting electrodes, despite decreased mechanical characteristics which nevertheless do not fully jeopardize their hand ability, demonstrate significantly higher electronic conductivity, since the binding network composed by insulating MFCs turns into conductive carbonaceous fibres upon annealing. Moreover, the cellulose handsheet support gets converted into a conductive carbon-paper sheet which can serve as embedded current collector to rapidly transfer the electrons to the external circuit. In the course of this chapter the carbonization procedure will be described and the effective prospects of this method will be demonstrated in increasing the performance of paper electrodes, as a result of the highly increased electrochemical performances and, in particular, the power output which allows to use this carbonised paper electrodes in more power demanding applications.