On the Thermal Stability of Selected Electrode Materials and Electrolytes for Na-Ion Batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are a technology rapidly approaching widespread adoption, so studying the thermal stability and safety of their components is a pressing issue. In this work, we employed differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and ex situ powder X-ray diffraction to study the thermal stability of several types of sodium-ion electrolytes (NaClO4 and NaPF6 solutions in PC, EC, DEC, and their mixtures) and various cathode and anode materials (Na3V2(PO4)3, Na3(VO)2(PO4)2F, β-NaVP2O7, and hard carbon) in combination with electrolytes. The obtained results indicate, first, the satisfactory thermal stability of liquid Na-ion electrolytes, which start to decompose only at 270~300 °C. Second, we observed that charged vanadium-based polyanionic cathodes, which appear to be very stable in the “dry” state, demonstrate an increase in decomposition enthalpy and a shift of the DSC peaks to lower temperatures when in contact with 1 M NaPF6 in the EC:DEC solution. However, the greatest thermal effect from the “electrode–electrolyte” interaction is demonstrated by the anode material: the heat of decomposition of the soaked electrode in the charged state is almost 40% higher than the sum of the decomposition enthalpies of the electrolyte and dry electrode separately.