Amorphous alloys — A kind of promising high-performance materials

Unlocking the local structure of hard carbon to grasp sodium-ion diffusion behavior for advanced sodium-ion batteries

“…Most of the current studies on the mechanism of sodium storage in HC only take a single factor into consideration, 7,28–31 while ignoring the correlation among different graphite microcrystalline parameters, which makes the obtained results unreliable. Additionally, although numerous recent studies have made great progress in understanding the connection between the HC structure and properties, 25,32 it has not yet been formed a clear understanding of the local microstructure of HC and the storage mechanism of sodium in HC on the atomic scale.…”

“…Herein, inspired by amorphous alloys, 28 we propose a new concept of the ‘dispersion region’ between graphite microcrystals and amorphous states to clarify these anomalies, which is an optimization and supplement to the existing HC model. This proposed dispersion region mentioned above differs from the previously reported interfaces, edges and defects of graphitic domains in the following points: (1) locations: the dispersion region is located between the surface and the graphite domain, and the edges and defects are located on the surface.…”