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http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/05/20170519-rice.html
The researchers had their "Aha!" moment in 2014, when co-lead author Abdul-Rahman Raji, a former graduate student in Tour's lab and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, began experimenting with lithium metal and the graphene-nanotube hybrid.
"I reasoned that lithium metal must have plated on the electrode while analyzing results of experiments carried out to store lithium ions in the anode material combined with a lithium cobalt oxide cathode in a full cell. We were excited because the voltage profile of the full cell was very flat. At that moment, we knew we had found something special." [Abdul-Rahman Raji]
Within a week, Raji and co-lead author Rodrigo Villegas Salvatierra, a Rice postdoctoral researcher, deposited lithium metal into a standalone hybrid anode so they could have a closer look with a microscope. "We were stunned to find no dendrites grown, and the rest is history," Raji said.
"Many people doing battery research only make the anode, because to do the whole package is much harder. We had to develop a commensurate cathode technology based upon sulfur to accommodate these ultrahigh-capacity lithium anodes in first-generation systems. We're producing these full batteries, cathode plus anode, on a pilot scale, and they're being tested." [James Tour]
