Very interesting. I'll be following this. My research is actually in designing and understanding lithium-ion anodes.

If you're curious, the material I'm using consists of an all-carbon anode with crystalline and amorphous domains. It performs about the same as current state of the art Li-ion battery anodes; however, the cost of manufacturing is incredibly cheap since the composite material is derived from low-cost plant matter (lignin). Plus, it lasts for many more charge-discharge cycles (well, there's actually a trade-off between capacity and cycling performance; you have to pick a middle-ground).

I'm performing reactive molecular dynamics simulations on computational models of these new composite systems to try and understand why they have such high performance. It's pretty cool work really.