N–Doped Porous Carbon Microspheres Derived from Yeast as Lithium Sulfide Hosts for Advanced Lithium-Ion Batteries

Sheng Liang,Changan Tian,Lingli Liu,Lei Hu,Dewei Liang,Tingting Yu,Chu Liang,Ningning Zhou,Lili Wang,Xuehua He,Jie Chen

doi:10.3390/pr9101822

Sheng Liang, Changan Tian + Show 9 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/pr9101822

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Journal: Processes	Publication Date: Oct 14, 2021
Citations: 1	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Hefei University, Zhejiang University of Technology

Abstract

Lithium sulfide (Li2S) is considered to be the best potential substitution for sulfur-based cathodes due to its high theoretical specific capacity (1166 mAh g−1) and good compatibility with lithium metal-free anodes. However, the electrical insulation nature of Li2S and severe shuttling of lithium polysulfides lead to poor rate capability and cycling stability. Confining Li2S into polar conductive porous carbon is regarded as a promising strategy to solve these problems. In this work, N-doped porous carbon microspheres (NPCMs) derived from yeasts are designed and synthesized as a host to confine Li2S. Nano Li2S is successfully entered into the NPCMs’ pores to form N-doped porous carbon microspheres–Li2S composite (NPCMs–Li2S) by a typical liquid infiltration–evaporation method. NPCMs–Li2S not only delivers a high initial discharge capacity of 1077 mAh g−1 at 0.2 A g−1, but also displays good rate capability of 198 mAh g−1 at 5.0 A g−1 and long-term lifespan over 500 cycles. The improved cycling and high-rate performance of NPCMs–Li2S can be attributed to the NPCMs’ host, realizing the strong fixation of LiPSs and enhancing the electron and charge conduction of Li2S in NPCMs–Li2S cathodes.

Highlights

With the ever-growing demand for lightweight electric vehicles with high mileages, there is an urgent need to develop new energy storage devices with higher energy density to replace the current intercalation-type lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries based on the multi-electron conversion reaction between S and Li2S are regarded as one of the most promising energy storage devices due to their high theoretical specific capacity (1675 mAh g−1) and energy density (2600 Wh kg−1) [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
We know that the S cathode is usually required in order to use lithium metal as the matching anode, which will greatly increase the safety hazards caused by lithium dendrite [19,20,21]

Summary

Introduction

With the ever-growing demand for lightweight electric vehicles with high mileages, there is an urgent need to develop new energy storage devices with higher energy density to replace the current intercalation-type lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries based on the multi-electron conversion reaction between S and Li2S are regarded as one of the most promising energy storage devices due to their high theoretical specific capacity (1675 mAh g−1) and energy density (2600 Wh kg−1) [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. We know that the S cathode is usually required in order to use lithium metal as the matching anode, which will greatly increase the safety hazards caused by lithium dendrite [19,20,21] In this regard, replacing S with full lithiation-state Li2S is considered to be the most effective way to avoid the formation of lithium dendrite since Li2S has good compatibility with lithium metal-free anodes (e.g., carbonaceous material, siliceous material and metallic oxide) [22,23,24,25]. Li2S is accompanied by low electron conductivity and severe LiPSs shuttling, similar to S [28,29,30,31]

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