Electrospun Sb/C Fibers for a Stable and Fast Sodium-Ion Battery Anode

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are considered a top alternative to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for large-scale renewable energy storage units due to their low cost and the abundance of sodium-bearing precursors in the earth's mineral deposits. However, the development of anode materials for SIBs to date has been mainly limited to carbonaceous materials with minimal research devoted to high capacity alloy-based materials. In this study, an antimony (Sb)/carbon (C) electrode with ~30 nm Sb nanoparticles (NPs) uniformly encapsulated in interconnecting one-dimensional (1D) 400 nm carbon fibers (denoted as SbNP@C) was fabricated using a simple and scalable electrospinning method. This binder-free, current…