According to the research team, lithium production may have a hard time keeping up with increasing demand.
"Lithium is a more expensive, limited resource that must be mined from just a few areas on the globe," said UT Dallas Professor Kyeongjae Cho.
The researchers believe using sodium would be less expensive because sodium is more abundant – but it has some drawbacks.
"There are no mining issues with sodium – it can be extracted from seawater. Unfortunately, although sodium-ion batteries might be less expensive than those using lithium, sodium tends to provide 20% lower energy density than lithium," Prof Cho explained.
"There was great hope several years ago in using manganese oxide in lithium-ion battery cathodes to increase capacity, but unfortunately, that combination becomes unstable.”
In the researchers’ design, sodium replaces most of the lithium in the cathode, and manganese is used instead of cobalt and nickel.
"Our sodium-ion material is more stable, but it still maintains the high-energy capacity of lithium," Cho said. "And we believe this is scalable. We want to make the material in such a way that the process is compatible with commercial mass production."