Interfacial design of cathode materials in lithium-sulfur batteries via an integrated computational approach

---

Authors

Yuxiao Lin¹ , Xinsheng Zhao¹ , Yue Qi²

1. Jiangsu Normal University
2. Brown University

Conference / event

4th International Conference on Energy Storage Materials, April 2023 (Shenzhen, China)

Poster summary

Mitigating the Li-polysulfide (Li-PS) shuttle problem and reducing the loss of cell-level energy density caused by carbon matrix and excessive electrolyte are two challenges faced by the development of Li-S batteries. Using an integrated computational approach, we successfully designed high performance Li-S batteries from the perspective of interfaces: a. Starting from the cathode-electrolyte interphase, we clarified that the origin of Li-PS generation came from the solvation status. We then proposed that the Li-PS shuttle could be mitigated by utilizing the synergetic effect of the salt concentration in electrolyte and the pore-size in carbon matrix. We further quantified the optimum pore-size and the corresponding synthesis conditions in carbon-nanotube-encapsulated-sulfur cathode. b. Starting from the carbon-sulfur interphase in the cathode, we qualitatively demonstrated the impact of cathodic porosity on the energy density of Li-S batteries. The derived multi-scale model could further quantitatively predict the discharge curves of Li-S batteries with varying cathodic porosity.

Keywords

Li-S battery, Pore and interface structure, Li-polysulfide shuttle, Energy density, Solvation structure, Integrated computational approach

Research areas

Nanoengineering, Material Sciences, Energy Engineering, Physics, Chemistry

References

No data provided

Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

No data provided

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 Lin et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.