Sulfur Nanoparticles Coated with Polyelectrolyte Nanomembranes for Sulfur Cathode

Elemental sulfur is the very attractive cathode for the post Li ion battery since the sulfur has high theoretical capacity of 1672 mAh/g¹⁾. Despite these attractive properties, practical application of Li-S battery is still unrealized by some big challenges on a sulfur cathode such as high resistance, low loading of active material and dissolution of the intermediate polysulfide into the electrolyte during charge and discharge. These issues cause low columbic efficiency, fast capacity fade and self-discharge of the Li-S battery. In order to suppress the dissolution of the intermediate polysulfides and minimize the addition of conductive carbon²⁾; our group has created a controlled nanoarchitecture template in which sulfur nanoparticles encapsulated with the conductive polyelectrolyte nanomembranes coated with nanocarbon similar to “chocolate hazelnut truffle”³⁾ (figure 1). The findings of this work will be discussed.

Figure 1. A three-dimensional view of our concept depicting the carbon infused sulfur core, the hollow carbon nanoparticles and multilayer selective polymer membrane decorated with functionalized carbon.

References

[1] Bruce, P. G., Freunberger, S. A., Hardwick, L. J. and Tarascon, J. –M., Nat. Mater., 11, 19-29 (2012).

[2] Bucur, C. B., Muldoon, J., Lita, A., Schlenoff, J. B., Ghostine, A. R., Dietz, S. and Allred, G., Energy and Environ. Sci., 6, 3286-3290 (2013).

[3] Muldoon, J., Bucur, C. B., Boaretto, N., Gregory, T. and N. di Vito, Polymers: Opening Doors to Future Batteries, Polymer Reviews, (2015, Accepted).