A solvothermal pre-oxidation strategy converting pitch from soft carbon to hard carbon for enhanced sodium storage

Due to its low cost and easy availability, the pitch is considered a promising precursor for soft carbon anodes. However, pitch-derived soft carbon shows a high graphitization degree and small interlayer spacing, resulting in its much lower sodium storage performance than hard carbon. We propose a novel preoxidation strategy to introduce additional oxygen atoms into the low-cost soft carbon precursor pitch to fabricate a defect-rich and large-interlayer spacing hard carbon anode(HPP-1100). Compared with the direct pyrolysis of pitch carbon, the sodium storage capacity of HPP-1100 is significantly improved from 120.3 m Ah/g to 306.7 m Ah/g, with an excellent rate and cycling capability(116.5 m Ah/g at 10 C). Moreover, when assorted with an O_(3)-Na(NiFeMn)1/3O_(2)cathode, the full cell delivers a high reversible capacity of 274.0 m Ah/g at 0.1 C with superb cycle life. This work provides a new solution for realizing the application of low-cost pitch anodes in Na-ion batteries.