Recycling spent masks to fabricate flexible hard carbon anode toward advanced sodium energy storage

Yuyang Gao; Zhidong Hou; Mingwei Jiang; Da Lei; Xiang Zhang; Yu Zhang; Jian-Gan Wang

doi:10.1016/j.jelechem.2023.117525

Recycling spent masks to fabricate flexible hard carbon anode toward advanced sodium energy storage

J Electroanal Chem (Lausanne). 2023 Jul 15:941:117525. doi: 10.1016/j.jelechem.2023.117525. Epub 2023 May 10.

Authors

Yuyang Gao¹, Zhidong Hou¹, Mingwei Jiang¹, Da Lei¹, Xiang Zhang¹, Yu Zhang², Jian-Gan Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing, Center for Nano Energy Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University and Shaanxi Joint Lab of Graphene (NPU), Xi'an 710072, China.
² School of Mechanical and Power Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, 130 Meilong Road, Shanghai 200237, China.

Abstract

The massive discard of spent masks during the COVID-19 pandemic imposes great environmental anxiety to the human society, which calls for a reliable and sustainable outlet to mitigate this issue. In this work, we demonstrate a green design strategy of recycling the spent masks to fabricate hard carbon fabrics toward high-efficient sodium energy storage. After a simple carbonization treatment, flexible hard carbon fabrics composed of interwoven microtubular fibers are obtained. When serving as binder-free anodes of sodium-ion batteries, a large Na-ion storage capacity of 280 mAh g^-1 is achieved for the optimized sample. More impressively, the flexible anode exhibits an initial coulombic efficiency of as high as 86% and excellent rate/cycling performance. The real-life practice of the flexible hard carbon is realized in the full-cells. The present study affords an enlightening approach for the recycling fabrication of high value-added hard carbon materials from the spent masks for advanced sodium energy storage.

Keywords: Flexible devices; Hard carbon; Recycling; Sodium-ion batteries; Spent mask.