(Digital Presentation) Design of High-Performance Antimony / MXene Hybrid Electrodes for Sodium-Ion Batteries
Authors: Arnold Stefanie , Gentile Antonio , Li Yunjie , Wang Qingsong , Marchionna Stefano , Ruffo Riccardo , Presser Volker 
Published: July 2022

As a result of the growing electrification and the ever-increasing demand for batteries, scarcity of fossil resources of lithium, and the resulting rise in price, energy storage technologies beyond lithium aroused high interest throughout the past years.1-3 Sodium is a naturally abundant element in the earth and therefore offers the opportunity to develop a promising low-cost, large-scale energy application with favorable energy and power densities. Recently, frequent new and further developments on the anode and cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries have been made. In particular, the development of anode material presents massive challenge while several requirements of high capacity and long lifetime/high durability need to be fulfilled.
The unique properties of the novel 2D material MXene, including their excellent electrical conductivity and accessible interlayer space, enable them to be used as attractive electrode materials for battery and supercapacitor. Still, a major drawback is that the capacity of Na+-ion storage by intercalation chemistry is limited due to the limited storage sites.4 As it comes to high-capacity materials, the research field of conversion and alloying materials provides highly attractive candidates. For example, antimony is a promising anode candidate, which undergoes alloying reaction with sodium to form Na3Sb, delivering a high theoretical capacity of 660 mAh g-1. Still, the major drawback of alloying materials is the high volume changes during sodiation and de-sodiation which often leads to electrode cracking, pulverization, continuous reformation of SEI and thus results in poor electrochemical performance. It is, therefore, highly promising to combine both, MXene and antimony for stable, high performance energy storage.
Our work explores the best strategy to achieve Sb/MXene hybrid electrodes. There is a tremendous influence in the electrochemical performance dependent on Sb-to-MXene ratio, Sb distribution, and Sb/MXene entanglement. The optimized performance does not align with the highest amount of antimony, the smallest nanoparticles, or the largest interlayer distance of the MXene but by the most homogeneous distribution of antimony and MXene while both components remain electrochemically addressable. With the best optimized hybrid material, we obtained electrodes showing a specific capacity of 450 mAh g-1 at 0.1 A g-1 and 365 mAh g-1 at 4 A g-1, with capacity retention of around 96% after 100 cycles.

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Figure: De-sodiation capacity and Coulombic efficiency versus cycle number of a simple mechanical mixed antimony MXene electrode (pink) and optimized hybrid material (blue).

Figure 1