Advanced metamaterials for sodium-ion battery anodes – a scalability and economic feasibility study

The sustainability of lithium-ion batteries is uncertain owing to limited availability of lithium and the growing furore over “African Blood Cobalt”, a key material of automotive LIB. Sodium-ion offer a more sustainable future with an inherently safer chemistry but suffer from larger size and weight. This high risk feasibility study seeks to address this by investigating the potential of novel metamaterial-carbon core/shell composites as high energy density, highly cyclable sodium-ion battery anodes to facilitate the manufacture sodium-ion batteries with no significant energy density loss compared to lithium-ion batteries. We will theoretically screen 100,000+ metamaterials for performance as sodium-ion anodes, and develop a novel process to synthesise carbon-composite material as a proof-of-principle. In parallel we raise the manufacturing readiness level of our hard carbon core anode material.