This looks closer to an industrial product than many new battery technology announcements. The cathode chemistry isn't exotic. The efficiency is high and stable (supplementary table 3). The rate capability is good. The specific energy is quite good. The cycling stability is pretty good.
The trickiest part looks like the chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles. CVD is a slow growth process that I normally see applied to creating precise, thin layers on flat substrates. I think it would be hard to scale this up to industrial (tonne per day) quantities of coated particles. Is it possible to replace that process with something like a fluidized bed reactor? I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.
The trickiest part looks like the chemical vapor deposition of graphene onto SiO2 nanoparticles. CVD is a slow growth process that I normally see applied to creating precise, thin layers on flat substrates. I think it would be hard to scale this up to industrial (tonne per day) quantities of coated particles. Is it possible to replace that process with something like a fluidized bed reactor? I'm out of my depth here regarding paths to scale-up -- I have a chemistry background, but I'm not qualified to comment on most chemical engineering.