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SODIUM ORGANIC BATTERIES

Greener and cheaper

Nature Energy volume 2, pages 836–837 (2017)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 29 January 2018

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Using cheap organic material as the cathode and abundant sodium as the charge carrier is attractive for sustainable battery technologies. Now, highly reversible four-sodium storage in a nano-sized disodium rhodizonate organic cathode is achieved.

Due to the high natural abundance of elemental sodium, sodium-ion batteries (SIB) are an attractive battery technology for grid-scale applications. Compared to the state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, however, most SIB electrode materials have rather low specific capacity and poor capacity retention upon cycling. This is primarily because of the large size of Na ions, which not only reduces the Na-ion storage capacity but also impedes their insertion and extraction into the lattice of host materials. The challenge also lies in the electrolyte development, as standard electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries do not usually perform well in sodium-ion batteries. Writing in Nature Energy, Zhenan Bao and colleagues1 from Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, USA, now report full utilization of four-Na storage in a nano-sized organic disodium rhodizonate (Na2C6O6) cathode material in an ether-based electrolyte, leading to a very high capacity of 484 mAh g–1.

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Fig. 1: Reported cathode materials for SIB and their electrochemical performances
Fig. 2

Change history

  • 29 January 2018

    In the HTML version of this News & Views originally published, the corresponding author was incorrectly flagged as being Laifa Shen; it should have been Yan Yu. This has now been corrected.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The CAS Key Laboratory of Materials for Energy Conversion, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Laifa Shen & Yan Yu

  2. Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstrasse 1, Stuttgart, 70569, Germany

    Laifa Shen

Authors
  1. Laifa Shen
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  2. Yan Yu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yan Yu.

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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0070-3.

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Shen, L., Yu, Y. Greener and cheaper. Nat Energy 2, 836–837 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0026-7

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