Electrospun Sb/C Fibers for a Stable and Fast Sodium-Ion Battery Anode

Abstract

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are considered a top alternative to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for large-scale renewable energy storage units due to their low cost and the abundance of sodium-bearing precursors in the earth’s mineral deposits. However, the development of anode materials for SIBs to date has been mainly limited to carbonaceous materials with minimal research devoted to high capacity alloy-based materials. In this study, an antimony (Sb)/carbon (C) electrode with ∼30 nm Sb nanoparticles (NPs) uniformly encapsulated in interconnecting one-dimensional (1D) 400 nm carbon fibers (denoted as [email protected]) was fabricated using a simple and scalable electrospinning method. This binder-free, current collector-free [email protected] electrode demonstrated high capacity and stable long-term cycling performance at various current densities. The [email protected] electrode showed an initial total capacity of 422 mAh/g_electrode and retained 350 mAh/g_electrode after 300 deep charge–discharge cycles under 100 mA/g_Sb. Moreover, because of the efficient 1D sodium-ion transport pathway and the highly conductive network of [email protected], the electrode preserved high overall capacities even when cycled at high currents, extending its usability to high power applications.