Society's reliance on lithium and cobalt for the batteries we use in our electronic devices
is increasingly becoming unsustainable, necessitating the exploration of alternative electrode
materials. With sodium’s exceptional abundance, it emerges as a cost–effective alternative to
lithium. Layered iron, titanium, and manganese sulfides can also serve as more sustainable
alternatives to the layered cobalt oxides which are currently used in electrode materials to store
the diffusing ions. Using microwave synthesis, the layered metal sulfides were synthesized more
efficiently when compared to the more traditionally used furnace/hydrothermal synthesis.
Powder x-ray diffraction, a characterization technique that utilizes the crystallites’ x-ray
diffraction patterns, was taken but yielded poor results, demonstrating the optimization for this
technique to be more difficult than expected.