Balancing surface adsorption and diffusion of lithium-polysulfides on nonconductive oxides for lithium–sulfur battery design
By Xinyong Tao, Jianguo Wang, Chong Liu, Haotian Wang, Hongbin Yao, Gengfeng Zheng, Z. Seh, Q. Cai, Weiyang Li, Guangmin Zhou and 2 more. Nature Communications, 2016
1,196 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Lithium–sulfur batteries have attracted attention due to their six-fold specific energy compared with conventional lithium-ion batteries. Dissolution of lithium polysulfides, volume expansion of sulfur and uncontrollable deposition of lithium sulfide are three of the main challenges for this technology. State-of-the-art sulfur cathodes based on metal-oxide nanostructures can suppress the shuttle-effect and enable controlled lithium sulfide deposition. However, a clear mechanistic understanding and corresponding selection criteria for the oxides are still lacking. Herein, various nonconductive metal-oxide nanoparticle-decorated carbon flakes are synthesized via a facile biotemplating method. The cathodes based on magnesium oxide, cerium oxide and lanthanum oxide show enhanced cycling performance. Adsorption experiments and theoretical calculations reveal that polysulfide capture by the oxides is via monolayered chemisorption. Moreover, we show that better surface diffusion leads to higher deposition efficiency of sulfide species on electrodes. Hence, oxide selection is proposed to balance optimization between sulfide-adsorption and diffusion on the oxides. Metal oxides can suppress detrimental polysulfide shuttling in lithium-sulfur batteries, however selection criteria for oxide materials are still lacking. Here, the authors investigate polysulfide adsorption and diffusion on metal oxides and propose selection criteria based on balancing these two effects.
Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7cc26d433e5eac2b943dd0bde3a3ccf2853eca5
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.