Mesoporous Carbon@Titanium Nitride Hollow Spheres as an Efficient SeS2 Host for Advanced Li-SeS2 Batteries

Abstract

The introduction of a certain proportion of selenium into sulfur-based cathodes is an effective strategy for enhancing the integrated battery performance. However, similar to sulfur, selenium sulfide cathodes suffer from poor cycling stability owing to the dissolution of reaction intermediate products. In this study, to exploit the advantages of SeS₂ to the full and avoid its shortcomings, we designed and synthesized a hollow mesoporous carbon@titanium nitride (HMC@TiN) host for loading 70 wt % of SeS₂ as a cathode material for Li-SeS₂ batteries. Benefiting from both physical and chemical entrapment by hollow mesoporous carbon and TiN, the HMC@TiN/SeS₂ cathode manifests high utilization of the active material and excellent cycling stability. Moreover, it exhibits promising areal capacity (up to 4 mAh cm^-2 ) with stable cell performance in the high-mass-loading electrode.

Keywords: hollow mesoporous carbon; mesoporous materials; rechargeable batteries; selenium sulfides; titanium nitride.