Last modified: 2023-12-11
Abstract
Nowadays, the technology industry plays a fundamental role in society, and, products such as smartphones, tablets, notebooks and so on, have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. The demand is for high-capacity, low-cost sustainable materials for large-scale battery applications. Looking ahead, sodium ion batteries (SIBs) have attracted attention in recent years, thanks to abundant sodium resources compared to lithium metal. With a view to sustainable research, several scientists and researchers have focused on renewable and low-cost solutions for the development of carbonaceous anode materials for SIBs derived from biomass, thus trying to deal with another problem related to the disposal of waste they produces enormous environmental pollution. Recently, several types of carbons have been synthesized from biomass wastes such as fruit waste, spent coffee, lotus seeds, rice husk etc. and used with good results as an anode material for sodium ion batteries. Such biomass carbons contain heteroatoms (N, O, S etc.) and constitute an interesting and efficient approach to improve the storage performance of high-performance battery applications. In this work, we reported the synthesis of electrospun carbon nanofibers mixed with activated carbons coming from banana peel in order to increase the distances between the nanofibers themselves and favor the intercalation-deintercalation processes of sodium ions. The physico-chemical properties of the material were investigated using XRD, SEM and XPS analyses. Charge-discharge tests at different current density values were carried out using the material as a self-supporting anode in coin cells in a half-cell configuration. In particular, XPS analysis showed an high atomic percentage of pyridine N content for the sample composed by carbon nanofiber and biomass derived carbon. Moreover, the specific capacity has been calculated as 159 mAh g−1 at 0.05 A g−1 and 135 mAh g−1 at 0.020 A g−1 and remained almost constant up to 1 A g-1. The obtained results are promising as a sustainable approach to the management of organic waste for energy applications, in particular the storage of sodium ions. Activated carbons from banana waste have characteristics that make them potential candidates as low-cost, environmentally friendly electrode materials for future large-scale sodium-ion battery applications.