• 文献标题:   Hierarchical urchin-shaped alpha-MnO2 on graphene-coated carbon microfibers: a binder-free electrode for rechargeable aqueous Na-air battery
  • 文献类型:   Article
  • 作  者:   KHAN Z, PARK S, HWANG SM, YANG J, LEE Y, SONG HK, KIM Y, KO H
  • 作者关键词:  
  • 出版物名称:   NPG ASIA MATERIALS
  • ISSN:   1884-4049 EI 1884-4057
  • 通讯作者地址:   UNIST
  • 被引频次:   50
  • DOI:   10.1038/am.2016.104
  • 出版年:   2016

▎ 摘  要

With the increasing demand of cost-effective and high-energy devices, sodium-air (Na-air) batteries have attracted immense interest due to the natural abundance of sodium in contrast to lithium. In particular, an aqueous Na-air battery has fundamental advantage over non-aqueous batteries due to the formation of highly water-soluble discharge product, which improve the overall performance of the system in terms of energy density, cyclic stability and round-trip efficiency. Despite these advantages, the rechargeability of aqueous Na-air batteries has not yet been demonstrated when using non-precious metal catalysts. In this work, we rationally synthesized a binder-free and robust electrode by directly growing urchin-shaped MnO2 nanowires on porous reduced graphene oxide-coated carbon microfiber (MGC) mats and fabricated an aqueous Na-air cell using the MGC as an air electrode to demonstrate the rechargeability of an aqueous Na-air battery. The fabricated aqueous Na-air cell exhibited excellent rechargeability and rate capability with a low overpotential gap (0.7 V) and high round-trip efficiency (81%). We believe that our approach opens a new avenue for synthesizing robust and binder-free electrodes that can be utilized to build not only metal-air batteries but also other energy systems such as supercapacitors, metal-ion batteries and fuel cells.