A lightweight and metal-free current collector for battery anode applications

The requirement for high energy density batteries is driving the development of high-capacity electrode materials while reducing the amount of inactive battery components such as separators, binders, and current collectors. Though current collectors are an inactive component, they are still required for successful working of a battery cell. Conventional current collectors include aluminum foil for cathode and copper foil for anode. Copper foil is quite heavy (8.7 mg/cm2) for 10 μm thickness. Therefore, there is a need for a lightweight current collector for anode applications. In this work, a metal-free current collector comprised of aligned carbon fiber (CFs) layer filled with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) mixed in polymer (P) is developed to be used as a current collector for anodes. Anodes coated on the CF-CNT-P showed lower charge transfer resistance and improved rate capability compared with the anodes fabricated on conventional copper foil-based current collectors. The CF-CNT-P are lighter (≈1.5 mg/cm2) than the commonly used copper foil (8.7 mg/cm2), which will increase the gravimetric energy density. •Developed a lightweight metal-free current collector for graphite anodes•The metal-free current collector demonstrated higher tensile strength•The metal-free current collector contributed ∼50 mAh/g at C/10•The metal-free current collector improved the energy density from 228 Wh/kg to 273 Wh/kg on electrode level