Highlights

CERIC users developed a new record-breaking electrode for sodium-ion batteries

Li-ion batteries are among the most important inventions of the past century, enabling a completely new paradigm of portable devices. Such a disruptive innovation was also awarded a Nobel prize in 2019. With the ever-growing diffusion of larger battery-powered items, such as cars and trucks, the debate on the abundance of raw materials, such as lithium and cobalt, needed for their construction is arising. Among the potential solutions for a post-lithium battery era, sodium-based batteries are in the front row. CERIC users developed a vanadium-based positive electrode material for high-voltage sodium-based batteries.

Assistant Professor Stanislav Fedotov (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology), his team and colleagues, including representatives from Lomonosov Moscow State University, proposed a new cathode material for sodium-ion batteries based on sodium and vanadium phosphate fluoride and tested its properties and performance. The work was supported by Russian Science Foundation (20-73-10248).
X-ray powder diffraction experiments, realised at the MCX beamline at the Italian CERIC Partner Facility at the Elettra synchrotron, allowed gathering relevant details of the inner battery material while in function, including the structural evolution of the material and its ion de/insertion mechanism.

In conclusion, the authors developed and synthesized a new positive electrode material for sodium-ion batteries showing attractive specific capacity and specific currents outcompeting the theoretical capacity of other known vanadium-based positive electrodes. Thanks to this study, a new step was achieved towards a new generation of batteries based on cheap and readily available raw materials, such as sodium.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Development of vanadium-based polyanion positive electrode active materials for high-voltage sodium-based batteries
Shraer S.D., Luchinin N.D., Trussov I.A., Aksyonov D.A., Morozov A.V., Ryazantsev S.V., Iarchuk A.R., Morozova P.A., Nikitina V.A., Stevenson K.J., Antipov E.V., Abakumov A.M. & Fedotov S.V., Nature Communications, 2022.