Tea-derived carbon materials as anode for high-performance sodium ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries (SIB) have attracted widespread attention in large-scale energy storage fields owing to the abundant reserve in the earth and similar properties of sodium to lithium. Biomass-based carbon materials with low-cost, controllable structure, simple processing technology, and environmental friendliness tick almost all the right boxes as one of the promising anode materials for SIB. Herein, we present a simple novel strategy involving tea tomenta biomass-derived carbon anode with enhanced interlayer carbon distance (0.44 nm) and high performance, which is constructed by N,P co-doped hard carbon (Tea-1100-NP) derived from tea tomenta. The prepared Tea-1100-NP composite could deliver a high reversible capacity (326.1 mAh/g at 28 mA/g), high initial coulombic efficiency (ICE = 90% at 28 mA/g), stable cycle life (262.4 mAh/g at 280 mA/g for 100 cycles), and superior rate performance (224.5 mAh/g at 1400 mA/g). Experimental results show that the excellent electrochemical performance of Tea-1100-NP due to the high number of active N,P-containing groups, and disordered amorphous structures provide ample active sites and increase the conductivity, meanwhile, large amounts of microporous shorten the Na⁺ diffusion distance as well as quicken ion transport. This work provides a new type of N,P co-doped high-performance tomenta-derived carbon, which may also greatly promote the commercial application of SIB.