• DOI:10.1039/c9nr04408f
• Corpus ID: 199437877

Hierarchical porous Fe/N doped carbon nanofibers as host materials for high sulfur loading Li-S batteries.

@article{Jiang2019HierarchicalPF,
  title={Hierarchical porous Fe/N doped carbon nanofibers as host materials for high sulfur loading Li-S batteries.},
  author={Mao Jiang and Ruxing Wang and Kangli Wang and Shu Gao and Jing Han and Jie Yan and Shijie Cheng and Kai Jiang},
  journal={Nanoscale},
  year={2019}
}

• Mao Jiang, Ruxing Wang, +5 authors Kai Jiang
• Published 15 August 2019
• Materials Science
• Nanoscale

Improving the sulfur utilization and cycling stability especially under high sulfur loading (>2 mg cm-2) is challenging due to the poor conductivity of sulfur and high soluble nature of polysulfides. Herein, we develop novel self-supporting carbon nanofibers with hierarchical porous structures and Fe/N absorption/nucleation centers (Fe/N-HPCNF) as high performance sulfur hosts via a facile co-spinning method. The highly interior porous carbon fiber structure provides good electrolyte infiltration, stable conductive networks and sufficient surfaces for fast Li+/electron transport and sulfur redox while maintaining high sulfur area loading. In addition, the abundant Fe/N heteroatoms evenly dispersed in the fiber strongly restrain polysulfide diffusion through a chemisorption effect and meanwhile regulate homogeneous sulfur nucleation, enhancing the stability of cathodes. Consequently, S@Fe/N-HPCNF cathodes realize a high initial specific capacity of 1273 mA h g-1 (areal capacity: 4.5 mA h cm-2) and long cycle life over 500 cycles with a high sulfur loading of 3.5 mg cm-2. A stable capacity of 6.6 mA h cm-2 is achieved even under 9 mg cm-2 sulfur. What's more, a pouch cell prototype with an ultrahigh sulfur area density (54 mg cm-2) was assembled and successfully lighted 10 yellow light-emitting diodes (LED), demonstrating the convenient scale-up of our S@Fe/N-HPCNF cathodes.