A team at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made advances to an iron-manganese phosphate cathode designed for sodium-ion batteries. Shanghai Metals Market published details of the work on November 11. The researchers tackled a key problem: structural degradation triggered by oxygen vacancies within the material. Their solution involved applying orbital tuning alongside charge compensation techniques.
The improvements show measurable gains in performance metrics. First-cycle Coulombic efficiency climbed to 97.0% from an earlier 87.0%. At the material level, the cathode demonstrated a reversible specific capacity of 125.7 mAh/g and specific energy of 421.1 Wh/kg. Pouch cells paired with hard carbon anodes held onto 93.6% of their initial capacity through 1,000 charge-discharge cycles at 1C rates. The available report does not specify journal publication, cell dimensions, operating temperature or manufacturing costs. It is also worth noting that material-level figures do not necessarily translate to equivalent performance when measured at the full cell level.
The research has already moved toward real-world deployment. A 100-tonne pilot production line for the cathode material has been constructed and brought online. DICP has formed industrialization partnerships with China Sodium Battery Group and other firms to scale the technology. In a separate development announced in December 2025, DICP revealed it had built and grid-connected a 100 kWh-class sodium-ion energy storage system that uses phosphate cathodes.
Source: Battery-News
