Three-Dimensional Porous Current Collectors As Electrodes for Li/S Battery Applications

Lithium-Sulfur (Li/S) chemistry is one of the most promising next-generation battery technologies due to their high theoretical energy density, inexpensive and eco-benign nature of sulfur. However, insulting nature of sulfur and the dissolution of formed intermediate polysulfides during charge-discharge process, have to be resolved to reach mass commercialization. Most of research efforts in Li/S batteries have focused on confining sulfur or dissolved polysulfides using carbon/polymer structures to overcome the detrimental effects they have on battery performance. In this study, we deviate completely from these confined approaches by introducing Metal/polysulfide/Metal configuration rather than focusing on electrochemical byproducts. By engineering electrodes into three dimensional format, we report a novel phonomena of controlling polysulfides shuttle process. We corroborate our findings using a detailed experimental parameters such as surface area of electrodes, different current rates and concentration of polysulfides. As a result, novel Metal/PS/Metal battery configuration delivered a discharge capacity of 900 mAh g^-1 and stability over 100 cycles.