Plastic Waste-Derived Carbon and Tin-Carbon Anodes for Sodium Ion Batteries

The current anode of choice for Na-ion batteries is hard carbons, normally produced from biomass waste. To access higher capacities, it is a common strategy to incorporate Sn phases in anodes as the theoretical capacity of Sn is 874 mAh/g (for Na15Sn4) compared to ~300mAh/g for hard carbons. The carbon phase microstructure affects the electrochemistry and the alloying mechanism of the Sn phase. To explore the effect of compositing SnO2 with carbon here we propose to study the Sn/C materials prepared at different carbonisation temperatures. We want to understand how the interactions between both phases evolves as carbonisation proceeds. The aim of this experiment is to examine the pore and atomic structure of carbon from the plastic-waste sample and Sn-PET sample. Furthermore, this route will allow us to understand how the formation of the amorphous carbon on the Sn phase at each temperature.