Investigating the Effect of Lewis Acid Base Interaction in Non-Stoichiometric Vanadium Oxide Based CNFs in Lithium – Sulfur Battery

Abstract

Despite the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries to reach practical energy densities of 500–600 Wh/kg, there are still many problems plaguing their development. The sulfur cathode suffers from low electrochemical utilization and poor cycle life owing to the insulating nature of S and the Li2S discharge product, and the shuttling of lithium polysulfide species especially at high areal mass loadings. Enormous progress has been achieved in terms of capacity and static life during the past few years to overcome these issues, by employing various carbon and inorganic materials (metal oxides, metal-organic frameworks). Recently, non-stoichiometric metal oxides have been employed as sulfur host materials due to their high conductivity and ability to bind polysulfides chemically through unsaturated metal ion sites. However, the formation of metal-suboxides involves a high-temperature calcination process, which usually results in dense host materials with lower accessible surface area, and a reduced host/polysulfide interaction. Moreover, these studies are often reported with low sulfur loadings (1–2 mg/cm2) resulting in lower areal capacity. Herein, we report the use of electrospun vanadium monoxide/carbon nanofibers (VCNFs) as cathode host in Li-S batteries, which provide high electrical conductivity for better sulfur utilization and strong Lewis acid-base interaction with polysulfides to suppress shuttle. The developed cathode possesses hierarchical micro-mesoporous architecture with inter-fiber spacing and a high surface area of 181 m2/g. The unique architecture overcomes the challenges associated with dense, low active surface area based powered oxide materials. The developed VCNFs-S cathodes with a high sulfur loading of 3 mg/cm2 exhibit initial discharge capacities of ∼1350, ∼1247, and ∼1113 mAh g–1 at 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 C rates, respectively, with long-term cycling (Fig 1a) over 200 cycles at 0.5 C rate. Moreover, at ~7mg/cm2, Li-S cells exhibit high areal capacity of 8 mAh/cm2 at a current density of C/10 up to 50 cycles (Fig 1b). The high surface area results in active reaction sites spread throughout the VCNFs, improving the accessible reaction area for better binding of polysulfides, enabling the smooth operation at high-loading in Li-S system. Using postmortem X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis, this study reveals the presence of strong Lewis acid–base interaction between VO (3d3) and Sx 2– through the coordinate covalent V–S bond formation. Additionally, freestanding nature of the cathodes eradicate the need of additional inactive elements, viz., binders, additional current collectors (Al-foil), and additives. Our results highlight the importance of developing high surface area metal-suboxides/monoxide-based conducting polar host materials for next-generation Li–S batteries. Figure 1