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Optimizing Heat-Treated Al-BDC@TiO2 to Improve the Electrochemical Properties of Lithium-Sulfur Batteries

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Abstract

Lithium-sulfur batteries (Li-S) are highly promising due to their high energy density and specific capacity; however, the poor conductivity of the active material leads to slow reaction kinetics, and the shuttle effect of the intermediate product lithium polysulfides leads to rapid capacity decay. Here, the effective encapsulation of Al-BDC by TiO2 particles is achieved by encapsulating an aluminum-based metal organic framework (Al-BDC) with terephthalic acid as the organic ligand and heat-treating at different temperatures. This method shows that the TiO2 particles can effectively encapsulate Al-BDC while maintaining the structural stability of Al-BDC after heat treatment at 400°C. The TiO2 crystallization is disordered after heat treatment at 300°C, and the TiO2 is exfoliated and the Al-BDC is collapsed after heat treatment at 500°C. In addition, TiO2 particles can be partially filled into the pores of Al-BDC. Therefore, Al-BDC@TiO2-400 can effectively inhibit the shuttle of polysulfides, and the corresponding Li-S batteries can achieve relatively high discharge specific capacity, rate performance and cycling stability. In particular, the Al-BDC@TiO2-400@S can achieve an initial discharge specific capacity of 907.6 mAh g−1 at 0.1C, and 686.5 mAh g−1 at 2C with remained capacity of 379.8 mAh g−1 after 400 cycles.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Technology Innovation Program funded by the National Key Laboratory of New Metallic Materials Open Fund (2022-Z01), Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Department Project (2023-ZDLGY-24, 2023-JC-QN-0473), Industrialization project of Shaanxi Provincial Education Department (21JC018).

Funding

This work is supported by the Technology Innovation Program funded by the National Key Laboratory of New Metallic Materials Open Fund (2022-Z01), Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Department Project (2023-ZDLGY-24, 2023-JC-QN-0473).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an, 710055, People’s Republic of China

    Kaiyu Xue, Liping Chen, Dingding Wu, Yang Bai & Juan Wang

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Xue, K., Chen, L., Wu, D. et al. Optimizing Heat-Treated Al-BDC@TiO2 to Improve the Electrochemical Properties of Lithium-Sulfur Batteries. J. Electron. Mater. 53, 1133–1141 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-023-10888-8

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