Regulate the reaction kinetic rate of lithium-sulfur battery by rational designing of TEMPO-oxidized cellulose nanofibers/rGO porous aerogel with monolayer MXene coating

Abstract

The sluggish reaction kinetics, polysulfide shuttling and low-efficiently use of sulfur largely imped the rate performance and energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries. To overcome the bottleneck, we used 1D TEMPO-oxidized cellulose nanofibers (T-CNF) and 2D rGO nanosheets as “rebar” and “cement” to construct a tough framework, and the monolayer MXene (m-MXene) was uniformly wrapped on the framework forming a MXene-coated three-dimensional aerogel (MCG aerogel) with high ionic and electronic conductivity. It is worth mentioning that the negatively charged groups of MXene can not only accelerate the ion diffusion rate and the conversion process of polysulfides by anchoring polysulfides through strong adsorption sites, but also construct an ion selective layer to inhibit the shuttle effect of polysulfides. Moreover, the T-CNF-enhanced three-dimensional structure alleviates the negative impact of sulfur volume expansion during the charging and discharging process, making it possible to directly used the aerogel as self-supporting electrodes without any binder. Therefore, the T-CNF/rGO hybrid aerogels with monolayer MXene coating as cathode materials for Lithium-sulfur batteries exhibit high discharge capacity of 1470 mA h g−1 at 0.1 C and improved rate capability of 744 mA h g−1 at 5 C. The high-strength framework structure with uniform surface sulfur-anchor coating design strategy offers a new angle of regulating the diffusion kinetic rate of lithium-sulfur batteries.