High-rate lithium/sodium storage capacities of nitrogen-enriched porous antimony composite prepared from organic-inorganic ligands

Highlights: • A novel core-hell Sb@NCs composite via organic-inorganic complex. • High content of nitrogen with 9.81 at. %. • Coordinate with more metal ions and enhance the active sites for ion storage. • Significantly improved performance of the half and full cells has been obtained. While Sb-based materials are attracting much attention as promising lithium/sodium ion batteries anodes because of excellent theoretical specific capacity (660 mAh g⁻¹), it is still challenging to achieve long cycling stability and excellent rate capability due to sluggish reaction kinetics and serious volume expansion during electrochemical process. Herein, to alleviate this issue, we design a novel nitrogen-enriched Sb@NCs composite through a facile and simple organic-inorganic coordination reaction, which could ensure metal ions and nitrogen element distributed on the carbon framework uniformly. In the lithium/sodium ion batteries matched with Sb@NCs composites with high nitrogen content (9.81 at.%) exhibit outstanding performances that a high-rate performance of 263.9 mAh g⁻¹ at 25 A g⁻¹ for lithium ion storage and a discharge capacity of 359.8 mAh g⁻¹ at 0.1 A g⁻¹ after 250 cycles for sodium ion storage. This facile and novel method may pave a way to prepare nitrogen-enriched materials to improve the ion storage and rate performances.