Synchrotron Radiation-Based X-Ray Characterizations of Sodium-Ion Battery

Due to the ever-increasing demand for energy supply in transportation, electronics, and grid energy storage, the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which are ubiquitous in modern society, are expected to grow continuously. Besides the expansion development of LIBs, lithium reserves are becoming scarce with a rising price trend. As one of its promising complements, sodium-ion batteries with Na+ charge carriers have attracted world's attention in recent years. Many state-of-the-art X-ray techniques have been developed for various types of measurements, such as scattering, spectroscopy, and imaging techniques. As a conventional characterization method, X-ray diffraction has been widely used for structure analysis of crystal or partially crystalline materials based on X-ray scattering. The pair distribution function is also a scattering technique gaining extensive application in recent years, which takes into account both the Bragg peaks and the diffuse scattering components of neutron or X-ray data.