Sodium-ion
batteries (SIBs), being an attractive candidate of lithium-ion
batteries, have attracted widespread attention as a result of sufficient
sodium resource with low price and their comparable suitability in
the field of energy storage. However, one of the main challenges for
their wide-scale application is to develop suitable anode materials
with excellent electrochemical performance. Herein, a novel orderly
layered VMoS2 (OL-VMS) anode material was synthesized through
a facile hydrothermal self-assembly approach followed by a heating
procedure. As the anode material of the SIBs, the unique structure
of OL-VMS not only facilitated the rapid migration of sodium ions
between the stacked layers but also provided a stable framework for
the volume change in the process of intercalation/deintercalation.
In addition, vanadium mediating in the framework caused more defects
to produce abundant storage sites for Na+. As such, the
obtained OL-VMS-based anode exhibited high reversible capacities of
602.9 mAh g–1 at 0.2 mA g–1 and
534 mAh g–1 even after 190-cycle operation at 2
A g–1. Furthermore, the OL-VMS-based anode delivered
an outstanding specific capacity of 626.4 mAh g–1 after 100-cycle testing at 2 A g–1 in a voltage
range from 0.01 to 3 V. In particular, even in the absence of conductive
carbon, it still showed an excellent specific capacity of 260 mAh
g–1 at 1 A g–1 after 130 cycles
in a 0.3–3 V voltage range, which should contribute to the
cost reduction and energy density increase.