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The development of affordable and safe lithium-ion batteries (LIB) which feature high storage capacity represents one of the priority strategies toward further introduction of green technologies in our everyday life. This paper presents a study into the candidate composite anodes for high energy LIB; these utilize reversible high storage capacity of ions of lithium in the form of alloys of the latter with nano-sized silicon, imbedded in a soft-carbon matrix, which in turn, are deposited on a robust graphitic core. These structures allow an efficient contact between the constituents to be realized at the same time providing space for Si nano-particles during lithiation/de-lithiation process. The synthetic route described herein has a high potential for a cost-effective scale-up with the battery materials industry. Presented results demonstrate feasibility for creation of new active materials for the negative electrodes in LIB, which feature the storage capacity up to 700 mAh g −1 at C/2 and in excess of 1450 mAh g −1 at C/20 cycling rates, respectively. This work also shows that the use of acrylic binder has a positive effect on the overall system performance, as compared to state-of-the-art PVDF-based binder systems.Enhancement of performance characteristics of secondary lithiumion batteries plays a key role in technological advancement of mobile power devices. 1-3 Last decade has witnessed a growing adoption of the LIB technology by the mobile power market, transportation and grid load leveling; widespread use of LIB technologies is likely to prevail in the years to come. [4][5][6][7][8] The pace of improvement of batteries has to keep up with the adoption of new energy-hungry devices by the market. However, this is hardly possible with conventional LIB battery chemistries. The levels of performance enhancement on the order of 3-5% on a full device level are a typical incremental improvement, which one may expect a battery technology to deliver to the marketplace. In this respect, the development of new active materials for lithium-ion batteries continues to play a decisive role in bringing the LIB technology to the level of performance that is in line with expectations of the original equipment manufacturers and end-users. One of the potential ways to achieve leapfrogging enhancement in the performance of LIB is by adding nano-sized silicon to graphite-based negative electrodes, as will be addressed in details below.Graphite is a well-established active material for negative electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. 9-15 When cycling against Li/Li + counter electrode, the theoretical capacity of graphite is 372 mAh g −1 -a value, which can be easily extracted from many highly refined, natural crystalline flake graphite precursors at C/20 cycling rate. 13,16,17

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