Thursday, 2 June 2022: 11:20
West Meeting Room 213 (Vancouver Convention Center)
Li-S batteries are regarded as the most promising energy storage systems due to their high energy density (2600 Wh/kg). But practical realization of the Li-S batteries is limited by low boiling ether electrolytes, polysulfide shuttling and insulating nature of sulfur. To address the above issues, chemically linked, confined sulfur - nitrogen containing conductive polymer composite has been developed as a novel composite cathode for Li-S batteries in carbonate electrolyte. But the polymer-sulfur composite limits the sulfur percentage reducing the achievable capacity typically to <600 mAh/g. In this work, we developed a facile synthesis methodology to tailor the sulfur percentage from 37% to up to 65%, resulting in a gravimetric capacity of 700 – 750 mAh/g per weight of the complete sulfur-polymer composite at 0.5C. Additionally, the composite is doped with metal dopants such as Mg, Co, Ni etc that improved the local conductivity, showed lower impedance, and enhanced the cycling performance compared to pristine sample. We made 25 cm2 pouch cells using the best cathode against Li-metal and carbonate electrolyte, which cycled stably for 200+ cycles with an areal capacity of >3mAh/cm2 and loading of -6 mg/cm2. This is unique as despite phenomenal coin cell level cycling shown in Li-S literature, most Li-S pouch cells typically fail in ~50 cycles.