A facile and cost effective synthesis of nitrogen and fluorine Co-doped porous carbon for high performance Sodium ion battery anode material

Abstract The development of cost effective, high performance, electrode materials for sodium ion batteries is of critical importance for large scale energy storage. Herein, we synthesize a novel nitrogen and fluorine co-doped porous carbon using a facile one-pot pyrolysis of three low cost components: polytetrafluoroethylene, a nitrogen-containing resin, and potassium hydroxide. The co-doped carbon comprises 3D assemblies of highly porous sheets with defects/disorders (and wide interlayer spacing of ~0.42 nm), which have a large surface area of 2040.3 m2 g−1 with hierarchical pore sizes. The advantageous combination of these structural features facilitates high sodium ion storage capacity, fast transfer kinetics and stable cycling. As a result, the co-doped carbon delivers an impressive 312.6 mAh g−1 at 0.1 A g−1 after 300 cycles and 215.3 mAh g−1 at 5 A g−1 after 5000 cycles (or 0.005% loss per cycle). Therefore, the excellent cycling performance of the carbon in combination with its convenient and low cost synthesis offers a promising sodium ion battery anode material for large scale energy storage.