Sieving carbons promise practical anodes with extensible low-potential plateaus for sodium batteries

Qi Li; Xiangsi Liu; Ying Tao; Jianxing Huang; Jun Zhang; Chunpeng Yang; Yibo Zhang; Siwei Zhang; Yiran Jia; Qiaowei Lin; Yuxuan Xiang; Jun Cheng; Wei Lv; Feiyu Kang; Yong Yang; Quan-Hong Yang

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwac084

Sieving carbons promise practical anodes with extensible low-potential plateaus for sodium batteries

Natl Sci Rev. 2022 May 5;9(8):nwac084. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwac084. eCollection 2022 Aug.

Authors

Qi Li¹, Xiangsi Liu², Ying Tao¹, Jianxing Huang², Jun Zhang¹, Chunpeng Yang¹, Yibo Zhang¹, Siwei Zhang³, Yiran Jia¹, Qiaowei Lin³, Yuxuan Xiang², Jun Cheng², Wei Lv³, Feiyu Kang³, Yong Yang², Quan-Hong Yang¹

Affiliations

¹ Nanoyang Group, State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials and Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
³ Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Graphene-Based Materials, Engineering Laboratory for Functionalized Carbon Materials, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China.

Abstract

Non-graphitic carbons are promising anode candidates for sodium-ion batteries, while their variable and complicated microstructure severely limits the rational design of high-energy carbon anodes that could accelerate the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries, as is the case for graphite in lithium-ion batteries. Here, we propose sieving carbons, featuring highly tunable nanopores with tightened pore entrances, as high-energy anodes with extensible and reversible low-potential plateaus (<0.1 V). It is shown that the tightened pore entrance blocks the formation of the solid electrolyte interphase inside the nanopores and enables sodium clustering to produce the plateau. Theoretical and spectroscopic studies also show that creating a larger area of sodiophilic pore surface leads to an almost linearly increased number of sodium clusters, and controlling the pore body diameter guarantees the reversibility of sodium cluster formation, producing a sieving carbon anode with a record-high plateau capacity of 400 mAh g^-1. More excitingly, this approach to preparing sieving carbons has the potential to be scalable for modifying different commercial porous carbons.

Keywords: low-potential plateau; pore entrance diameter; pore surface area; sieving carbons; sodium-ion batteries.