A wet granulation to dense graphite particles for high volumetric lithium-ion storage

Graphite is the most widely used anode material for lithium ion batteries (LIBs), and increasing the sphericity and density of graphite is the main way to further improve energy density of LIBs. Herein, we report a simple preparation of high tap-density graphite granules by the high-shear wet granulation. In this way, we densified two kinds of graphite into granule, namely wet-granulation graphitic onion-like carbon (WG-GOC) and wet-granulation artificial graphite (WG-AG). It is found that, compared with the original graphite before granulation, the tap density of WG-GOC increases by ca.34%, and WG-AG increases by ca.44%. Therefore, when as the anode of LIBs,, the volumetric capacities of WG-GOC and WG-AG have increased by ca.35% and ca.55%, respectively, at the current density of 50 mA g−1. In addition, the rate performance of WG-GOC also has been significantly improved. The volumetric capacity of WG-GOC increased by 169.1% at the current density of 2000 mA g−1. The significant improvement of electrochemical performance benefits from the higher tap density of the prepared graphite granules. Hence, we developed a facile wet-granulation to prepare high tap-density graphite anodes, which conducive to the development of high volumetric capacity.