A Sulfur Fixation Strategy via Magnesium Oxide for Constructing High-Rate Hard Carbon Anodes in Sodium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

Sulfur doping is an effective strategy to promote the electrochemical performance of hard carbon anode. However, its commercial applications of hard carbon materials have been limited by low initial Coulombic efficiency and poor cycle by traditional sulfur doping method. Herein, we used sulfur fixation strategy through magnesium oxide to produce hard carbon by sodium lignosulfonate precursor, which adjusted the microstructure of the hard carbon with increasing the disorder degree and interlayer spacing. Thereby, this not only provides more space and better kinetic conditions for the insertion/deinsertion of Na⁺ but also introduces abundant defects and active sites, thereby enhancing the surface adsorption capacity and significantly improving the electronic conductivity. As a result, the sulfur-doped hard carbon material achieved a reversible initial capacity of 307.1 mAh g⁻¹ at 20 mA g⁻¹, which also has a higher capacity retention of 77.5% at 500 mA g⁻¹ compared with untreated hard carbon (capacity retention 66.5%). Moreover, the 21700 cylindrical batteries with the sulfur-doped hard carbon as anode have the capacity retention of 91.5% at 1.4 A after 400 cycles. This method opens up a new path for the preparation of long cycle hard carbon anodes.

Keywords

hard carbon / sodium lignosulfonate / sodium-ion batteries / sulfur-doped

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2026 The Author(s). Energy & Environmental Materials published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Zhengzhou University.