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Defect engineering on carbon black for accelerated Li-S chemistry

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Abstract

Rationally designing sulfur hosts with the functions of confining lithium polysulfides (LiPSs) and promoting sulfur reaction kinetics is critically important to the real implementation of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries. Herein, the defect-rich carbon black (CB) as sulfur host was successfully constructed through a rationally regulated defect engineering. Thus-obtained defect-rich CB can act as an active electrocatalyst to enable the sulfur redox reaction kinetics, which could be regarded as effective inhibitor to alleviate the LiPS shuttle. As expected, the cathode consisting of sulfur and defect-rich CB presents a high rate capacity of 783.8 mA·h·g−1 at 4 C and a low capacity decay of only 0.07% per cycle at 2 C over 500 cycles, showing favorable electrochemical performances. The strategy in this investigation paves a promising way to the design of active electrocatalysts for realizing commercially viable Li-S batteries.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFA0206703), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21671183), and the Project of State Key Laboratory of Environment-Friendly Energy Materials (SWUST, Nos. 19FKSY16 and 18ZD320304).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Wenlong Cai, Yuting Fang, Weiwei Wang, Huaisheng Ao, Yongchun Zhu & Yitai Qian

  2. State Key Laboratory of Environment-Friendly Energy Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, 621010, China

    Yingze Song & Songlin Yu

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  1. Wenlong Cai
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Correspondence to Yingze Song or Yongchun Zhu.

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Cai, W., Song, Y., Fang, Y. et al. Defect engineering on carbon black for accelerated Li-S chemistry. Nano Res. 13, 3315–3320 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-3009-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-3009-0

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