Fast Charging Aluminum Battery w/ Graphite Cathode

Another potential market for graphite, IMO.  Hopefully as this battery is fully developed the use of graphite will continue to be used in its construction.  Looks promising but still seems like more development will be needed.  If it could be fully developed with the continued use of graphite, could be a nice market for graphite sellers.

Recent news from Stanford News, Stanford University, Stanford, California, April 6, 2015

Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that's fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today.
"We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames," said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. "Our new battery won't catch fire, even if you drill through it."

Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in "An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery," which will be published in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature.

Graphite cathode
An aluminum-ion battery consists of two electrodes: a negatively charged anode made of aluminum and a positively charged cathode.
"People have tried different kinds of materials for the cathode," Dai said. "We accidentally discovered that a simple solution is to use graphite, which is basically carbon. In our study, we identified a few types of graphite material that give us very good performance."
For the experimental battery, the Stanford team placed the aluminum anode and graphite cathode, along with an ionic liquid electrolyte, inside a flexible polymer- coated pouch.

"In our study, we have videos showing that you can drill through the aluminum battery pouch, and it will continue working for a while longer without catching fire," Dai said. "But lithium batteries can go off in an unpredictable manner  – in the air, the car or in your pocket. Besides safety, we have achieved major breakthroughs in aluminum battery performance."
One example is ultra-fast charging. Smartphone owners know that it can take hours to charge a lithium-ion battery. But the Stanford team reported "unprecedented charging times" of down to one minute with the aluminum prototype.
Durability is another important factor. Aluminum batteries developed at other laboratories usually died after just 100 charge-discharge cycles. But the Stanford battery was able to withstand more than 7,500 cycles without any loss of capacity. "This was the first time an ultra-fast aluminum-ion battery was constructed with stability over thousands of cycles," the authors wrote.
By comparison, a typical lithium-ion battery lasts about 1,000 cycles.
"Another feature of the aluminum battery is flexibility," Gong said. "You can bend it and fold it, so it has the potential for use in flexible electronic devices. Aluminum is also a cheaper metal than lithium."

https://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion-battery-033115.html

If  this R&D project can be developed for commercial use and continue to use graphite in its construction, the graphite materail needed could be a nice bit of business for a speciality graphite producer.

As always, please use due dilligence and gather future information, news and developments on this R&D project to determine its future viability and chances of commercial success and if a graphite material will continue to be used its its commercial sales' version.