Sulfur-encapsulated in heteroatom-doped hierarchical porous carbon derived from goat hair for high performance lithium–sulfur batteries

By Juan Ren, Yibei Zhou, Huali Wu, Fengyu Xie, Chenggang Xu, Dunmin Lin. Journal of Energy Chemistry, 2018

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Abstract Biomass-derived carbon materials have aroused widespread concern as host material of sulfur to enhance electrochemical performances for lithium–sulfur batteries. Herein, goat hair, as a low-cost and eco-friendly precursor, is employed to fabricate cauliflower-like in-situ nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus tri-doped porous biomass carbon (NOPC) by a facile activation with H3PO4 and carbonization process. The morphology and microstructure of NOPC can be readily tuned by altering pyrolysis temperature. The as-prepared NOPC matrix material carbonized at 600 °C possesses 3D hierarchical porous structure, high specific surface area (535.352 m2 g−1), and appropriate pore size and pore size distribution. Encapsulating sulfur into the NOPC depends on a stem-melting technology as cathode materials of Li–S batteries. Due to the synergistic effect of special physical structure and inherent tri-doping of N, O and P, electrons and ions transfer and utilization of active sulfur in the materials are improved, and the shuttle behaviors of soluble lithium polysulfides are also mitigated. Consequently, the S/NOPC-600 composite exhibits excellent electrochemical performance, giving a high initial discharge capacity of 1185 mA h g−1 at 0.05 C and maintaining a relatively considerable capacity of 489 mA h g−1 at 0.2 C after 300 cycles. Our work shows that a promising candidate for cathode material of Li–S batteries can be synthesized using low-cost and renewable biomass materials by a facile process.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a925d20c725939967899b52a75b5548db38c88f7