Predicting Sodium-Ion Battery Performance through Surface Chemistry Analysis and Textural Properties of Functionalized Hard Carbons Using AI.

Traditionally, the performance of sodium-ion batteries has been predicted based on a single characteristic of the electrodes and its relationship to specific capacity increase. However, recent studies have shown that this hypothesis is incorrect because their performance depends on multiple physical and chemical variables. Due to the above, the present communication shows machine learning as an innovative strategy to predict the performance of functionalized hard carbon anodes prepared from grapefruit peels. In this sense, a three-layer feed-forward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was designed. The inputs used to feed the ANN were the physicochemical characteristics of the materials, which consisted of mercury intrusion porosimetry data (S and average pore), elemental analysis (C, H, N, S), I/I ratio obtained from RAMAN studies, and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy data of the C, N and O regions. In addition, two more inputs were added: the cycle number and the applied C-rate. The ANN architecture consisted of a first hidden layer with a sigmoid transfer function and a second layer with a log-sigmoid transfer function. Finally, a sigmoid transfer function was used in the output layer. Each layer had 10 neurons. The training algorithm used was Bayesian regularization. The results show that the proposed ANN correctly predicts (R > 0.99) the performance of all materials. The proposed strategy provides critical insights into the variables that must be controlled during material synthesis to optimize the process and accelerate progress in developing tailored materials.