Investigating the Electrochemical Intercalation of Lithium into Prussian White using Operando XRD
Agnes-Matilda Mattson
Uppsala University
Most batteries today consist of expensive and scarce metals such as lithium and cobalt. In order to meet the increased demands, other chemistries need to be investigated, for example Sodium-ion batteries (NIBs). An interesting cathode material for NIBs is Prussian White (PW), that is both environmentally friendly and cheap. During use in a battery PW undergoes a phase transition that induces a large volume change. It has been proposed that small ions or neutral guest molecules could mitigate this volume change. In this work the use of lithium to stabilise the framework of PW was investigated using galvanostatic cycling to synthesise the material and Operando XRD to study the phase transition occurring during cycling. The results show that lithium can stabilise the framework by shifting the detrimental phase transition to a higher SOC. As a result, a larger potential window can be utilised without detrimental structural degradation occurring during cycling of the battery.