Nitrogen as An Anionic Center/Dopant for Next-Generation High-Performance Lithium/Sodium-Ion Battery Electrodes: Key Scientific Issues, Challenges and Perspectives

The rapid progress of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) and sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) have extensively promoted the rechargeable battery technology in the fields of electric vehicles and grid scale energy storage systems. With recent highly effective nitrogen doping strategy in terms of improving the overall electrochemical performance in various sorts of battery systems, the bulk N doping/substitution lays on the core innovations toward structural manipulation toward higher ionic conductivity, elevated reversible working plateau, etc. However, the key scientific and practical issues such as the phase formation process, phase transition kinetics, valence change and anionic/cationic physical/chemical behaviors still leave open questions in the direction of their real applications in the next-generation battery technology. In light of this, a timely and in-depth perspective is provided on the development of the bulk N doping/substitution strategy of these high-performance electrodes of LIBs/SIBs adapting nitrogen as anionic center/dopant. Both the variations of phase and structural constitutions, alkali ion storage mechanism, electrochemical change, and the alkali ion kinetics, which are the key scientific parts for the future explorations of these novel and promising electrodes are highlighted. The most urgent and critical commercial obstacles or challenges towards cost-efficiency synthetic approach without excessive environmental pollutions are also outlined. With the participation of nitrogen in bulk crystals , the overall specific energy density of next-generation alkali ion batteries will be reasonably promoted and accelerated in the near future.