Ultrahigh rate and high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries with resorcinol-formaldehyde xerogel derived highly porous carbon matrix as sulfur cathode host

Gaikwad, Mayur M. and Sarode, Krishna K. and Pathak, Anil D. and Sharma, Chandra Shekhar (2021) Ultrahigh rate and high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries with resorcinol-formaldehyde xerogel derived highly porous carbon matrix as sulfur cathode host. Chemical Engineering Journal, 425. pp. 1-14. ISSN 1385-8947

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Abstract

Lithium-Sulfur Battery (LSB) is looked upon as a promising energy storage device to be used in high end applications due to their high energy metrics. However, the successful commercialization of LSBs is hauled by limitations of low sulfur utilization, insulating sulfur, and poor cyclic stability. Restricting polysulfide shuttling and improving electrochemical kinetics are important in developing high-performance LSBs. Here, we have resolved these critical problems associated with LSBs even at extreme operating current conditions using highly porous N-doped resorcinol–formaldehyde (RF) carbon xerogel as sulfur host. We developed a RF xerogel-derived highly porous N-doped carbon matrix by two-step carbonization-activation strategy for anchoring polysulfides and accelerating their redox transformation simultaneously. The high amount of N-doping (10%) and graphitic domains, amid the porous amorphous carbon, possess active sites to entrap polysulfides. Besides, they provide pathways for high electron transfer for their electro-catalysis. First principle calculations also establish that the enhanced performance is attributed to high pyrrolic nitrogen content in the porous carbon structure. As a result, the A-N-RFC/S cathode composite exhibits excellent cycling stability, maintaining a specific capacity of 631 mAh g−1 at 4 C even after 500 cycles, corresponding to an extremely low capacity decay of 0.0017% per cycle with coulombic efficiency of more than 95%. Additionally, the composite material displays astonishing rate performance exhibiting an outstanding discharge capacity of 359 mAh g−1 even at an ultra-high current rate 20 C. The synthesized material overcomes the two key parameters, cyclic stability and rate performance required for commercial LSBs by suppressing the detrimental polysulfide shuttling. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

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IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Sharma, Chandra Shekhar	https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3821-1471

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

The authors acknowledge the SERB Young Scientist Scheme and IMPRINT I 7035 project of MHRD and Dept. of Heavy Industries, Govt. of India, for the financial grant to carry out this work. We thank IIT Hyderabad for providing necessary infrastructure to carry out the research work. We also acknowledge BITS Pilani, Hyderabad for XPS facilities. Authors also acknowledge to Dr. Akhilesh Kumar Singh, IIT Bhubaneswar for providing support in computational facility

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Cathode composite; Highly porous carbon; Lithium-sulfur battery; N-doping; RF xerogel

Subjects:

Chemical Engineering

Divisions:

Department of Chemical Engineering

Depositing User:

. LibTrainee 2021

Date Deposited:

06 Oct 2022 13:43

Last Modified:

06 Oct 2022 13:43