Effect of turbostratic disorder in graphitic carbon hosts on the intercalation of lithium.

The intercalation of lithium into graphite was discovered in the 1950's.' After that, many studies focused on the staged phases ' that are formed during lithium intercalation in graphite and in graphitic carbon types. Safran concluded that the staging phenomenon is the result of the competition between interlayer repulsive and in-plane attractive interactions between the intercalated lithium. Stage-n order is a sequence of n graphite sheets and one intercalate layer as shown schematically in Fig. 1. Recently, intercalated carbon types and graphites have found application in advanced "lithium-ion" batteries. In such cells, Li C6 is used as the anode and an intercalated transition-metal oxide, like LiCoOz, as the cathode. Developers of such batteries have noticed that the maximum amount of lithium which can be intercalated within the carbon, x „,depends on the crystal structure of the carbon. Furthermore, our own earlier work 6