A little sodium goes a long way. At least that's the case in carbon-based energy technology. Specifically, embedding sodium in carbon materials can tremendously improve electrodes.
A research team led by Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Carroll McArthur Professor of materials science and engineering at Michigan Tech, created a brand-new way to synthesize sodium-embedded carbon nanowalls. Previously, the material was only theoretical and the journal Nano Letters recently published this invention.
High electrical conductivity and large accessible surface area, which are required for ideal electrode materials in energy devices, are opposed to each other in current materials. Amorphous carbon has low conductivity but large surface area. Graphite, on the other hand, has high conductivity but low surface area. Three-dimensional graphene has the best of both properties -- and the sodium-embedded carbon invented by Hu at Michigan Tech is even better.
"Sodium-embedded carbon's conductivity is two orders of magnitude larger than three-dimensional graphene," Hu says. "The nanowall structure, with all its channels and pores, also has a large accessible surface area comparable to graphene."
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