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Hierarchical sodium-rich Prussian blue hollow nanospheres as high-performance cathode for sodium-ion batteries

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Abstract

Recently, Prussian blue and its analogues (PBAs) have attracted tremendous attention as cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries because of their good cycling performance, low cost, and environmental friendliness. However, they still suffer from kinetic problems associated with the solid-state diffusion of sodium ions during charge and discharge processes, which leads to low specific capacity and poor rate performances. In this work, novel sodium iron hexacyanoferrate nanospheres with a hierarchical hollow architecture have been fabricated as cathode material for sodium-ion batteries by a facile template method. Due to the unique hollow sphere morphology, sodium iron hexacyanoferrate nanospheres can provide large numbers of active sites and high diffusion dynamics for sodium ions, thus delivering a high specific capacity (142 mAh/g), a superior rate capability, and an excellent cycling stability. Furthermore, the sodium insertion/extraction mechanism has been studied by in situ X-ray diffraction, which provides further insight into the crystal structure change of the sodium iron hexacyanoferrate nanosphere cathode material during charge and discharge processes.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) project (ARENA 2014/RND106) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the ARC Discovery Project (DP170100436).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Clean Energy Technology, Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Xiao Tang, Hao Liu, Dawei Su & Guoxiu Wang

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, The Netherlands

    Peter H. L. Notten

  3. Fundamental Electrochemistry (IEK9), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, D-52425, Germany

    Peter H. L. Notten

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  1. Xiao Tang
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  2. Hao Liu
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  3. Dawei Su
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Correspondence to Guoxiu Wang.

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Tang, X., Liu, H., Su, D. et al. Hierarchical sodium-rich Prussian blue hollow nanospheres as high-performance cathode for sodium-ion batteries. Nano Res. 11, 3979–3990 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-1979-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-1979-y

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