MOFs-derived transition metal sulfide composites for advanced sodium ion batteries

Abstract Sodium ion batteries (SIBs) have been becoming the promising alternatives of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) and attracted extraordinary attentions in recent decades owing to lower price and much more natural abundant sodium resources and their comparable high efficiencies to LIBs. Nevertheless, one of the bottlenecks for their commercialization is to develop and design suitable anode materials possessing excellent specific capacity, good reversibility, and long-life cyclic stability. In the developed anode materials for SIBs, transition metal sulfides (TMSs) with low cost, high theoretical capacities, rich redox reactions, decent electrochemical reversibility and high electronic conductivity have been widely studied. However, the cycling stability of such materials still limits their applications. To solve this issue, the TMSs derived from metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have been developed as the promising anode materials of SIBs, which exhibit high specific capacity, good rate and cyclic performances. Herein, the MOFs-derived TMSs prepared for SIBs in the past decades are reviewed in details. The recent progresses utilizing in situ characterization techniques to explore complicated electrochemical reaction mechanisms of TMSs for SIBs are introduced and highlighted. In addition, the challenges existing in the future research on MOFs-derived TMSs are discussed. It could provide guidance on developing and designing the suitable anode materials based on MOFs-derived TMSs for high-performance SIBs, which will contribute to achieving the sustainable and renewable society.