Journal of the American Chemical Society
Journal of the American Chemical Society
5 years ago

Healing High-Loading Sulfur Electrodes with Unprecedented Long Cycling Life: Spatial Heterogeneity Control

Healing High-Loading Sulfur Electrodes with Unprecedented Long Cycling Life: Spatial Heterogeneity Control
Wen-Tao Xu, Fei Wei, Qiang Zhang, Jia-Qi Huang, Xin-Bing Cheng, Chen-Zi Zhao, Hong-Jie Peng, Xin-Yan Liu
Self-healing capability helps biological systems to maintain their survivability and extend their lifespan. Similarly, self-healing is also beneficial to next-generation secondary batteries because high-capacity electrode materials, especially the cathodes such as oxygen or sulfur, suffer from shortened cycle lives resulting from irreversible and unstable phase transfer. Herein, by mimicking a biological self-healing process, fibrinolysis, we introduced an extrinsic healing agent, polysulfide, to enable the stable operation of sulfur microparticle (SMiP) cathodes. An optimized capacity (∼3.7 mAh cm–2) with almost no decay after 2000 cycles at a high sulfur loading of 5.6 mg(S) cm–2 was attained. The inert SMiP is activated by the solubilization effect of polysulfides whereas the unstable phase transfer is mediated by mitigated spatial heterogeneity of polysulfides, which induces uniform nucleation and growth of solid compounds. The comprehensive understanding of the healing process, as well as of the spatial heterogeneity, could further guide the design of novel healing agents (e.g., lithium iodine) toward high-performance rechargeable batteries.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.6b12358

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.6b12358

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.