Washington State University (WSU) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers, with colleagues at Beijing University of Technology and Brookhaven National Laboratory, have created a sodium-ion battery that holds as much energy and works as well as some commercial lithium-ion battery chemistries, making for a potentially viable battery technology out of abundant and cheap materials. A paper on their work is published in the journal, ACS Energy Letters . Although O3-layered metal oxides are promising cathode materials for high-energy Na-ion batteries, they suffer from fast capacity fade. The WSU-PNNL team developed a high-performance O3-NaNi 0.68 Mn 0.22 Co 0.10 O 2 cathode by suppressing the formation of a rock salt layer at the cathode surface with an advanced electrolyte. The cathode can deliver a high specific capacity of ∼196 mAh g –1 and demonstrates >80% capacity retention over 1,000 cycles. NaNi 0.68 Mn 0.22 Co 0.10 O 2 –hard […]