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Hard carbon (HC) is an attractive anode material for low-cost and high-energy density sodium-ion batteries (SIBs); however, its low initial Coulombic efficiency (ICE) limits its practical battery application. To overcome this problem, we reported a facile strategy to compensate the irreversible capacity loss of HC anodes simply by a chemical presodiation reaction of the HC electrode with a sodiation reagent (sodium biphenyl, Na-Bp). Benefiting from the strong sodiation ability of Na-Bp, HC anodes can be presodiated rapidly in a very short time and the presodiated HC (NaxHC) is found to have a desirable ICE of 100%. When coupled with the Na3V2(PO4)3 cathode to build a SIB full cell, the NaxHC||Na3V2(PO4)3 cell exhibits a high ICE of ∼95.0% and an elevated energy density of 218 W h kg-1, which are far superior to those of the control cell using a pristine HC anode (50% ICE and 120 W h kg-1, respectively), suggesting great advantages brought about by the chemical presodiation process. More importantly, this presodiation reaction is very mild and highly efficient and can be widely extended to a variety of Na-storage materials, offering a new route to develop high-performance Na-storage materials for practical battery applications.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.