Rational Design and General Synthesis of S-Doped Hard Carbon with Tunable Doping Sites toward Excellent Na-Ion Storage Performance

Heteroatom-doping is a promising strategy to tuning the microstructure of carbon material toward improved electrochemical storage performance. However, it is a big challenge to control the doping sites for heteroatom-doping and the rational design of doping is urgently needed. Herein, S doping sites and the influence of interlayer spacing for two kinds of hard carbon, perfect structure and vacancy defect structure, are explored by the first-principles method. S prefers doping in the interlayer for the former with interlayer distance of 3.997 angstrom, while S is doped on the carbon layer for the latter with interlayer distance of 3.695 angstrom. More importantly, one step molten salts method is developed as a universal synthetic strategy to fabricate hard carbon with tunable microstructure. It is demonstrated by the experimental results that S-doping hard carbon with fewer pores exhibits a larger interlayer spacing than that of porous carbon, agreeing well with the theoretical prediction. Furthermore, the S-doping carbon with larger interlayer distance and fewer pores exhibits remarkably large reversible capacity, excellent rate performance, and long-term cycling stability for Na-ion storage. A stable and reversible capacity of approximate to 200 mAh g(-1) is steadily kept even after 4000 cycles at 1 A g(-1).