Unlocking the multi-electron transfer reaction in NASICON-type cathode materials

Abstract

The growing concern about scarcity and large-scale applications of lithium resources has attracted efforts to realize cost-effective phosphate-based cathode materials for next-generation Na-ion batteries (NIBs). In previous work, a series of materials (such as Na _4 Fe _3 (PO _4 ) _2 (P _2 O _7 ), Na _3 VCr(PO _4 ) _3 , Na _4 VMn(PO _4 ) _3 , Na _3 MnTi(PO _4 ) _3 , Na _3 MnZr(PO _4 ) _3 , etc) with ∼120 mAh g ^−1 specific capacity and high operating potential has been proposed. However, the mass ratio of the total transition metal in the above compounds is only ∼22 wt%, which means that one-electron transfer for each transition metal shows a limited capacity (the mass ratio of Fe is 35.4 wt% in LiFePO _4 ). Therefore, a multi-electron transfer reaction is necessary to catch up to or go beyond the electrochemical performance of LiFePO _4 . This review summarizes the reported NASICON-type and other phosphate-based cathode materials. On the basis of the aforementioned experimental results, we pinpoint the multi-electron behavior of transition metals and shed light on designing rules for developing high-capacity cathodes in NIBs.

Keywords

• NASICON
• Na-ion batteries
• cathode materials
• multi-electron transfer reactions