β-FeOOH Interlayer With Abundant Oxygen Vacancy Toward Boosting Catalytic Effect for Lithium Sulfur Batteries

Yingying Li; Xifei Li; Youchen Hao; Alibek Kakimov; Dejun Li; Qian Sun; Liang Kou; Zhanyuan Tian; Le Shao; Cheng Zhang; Jiujun Zhang; Xueliang Sun

doi:10.3389/fchem.2020.00309

β-FeOOH Interlayer With Abundant Oxygen Vacancy Toward Boosting Catalytic Effect for Lithium Sulfur Batteries

Front Chem. 2020 Apr 23:8:309. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00309. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Yingying Li¹, Xifei Li^{1

2

3}, Youchen Hao², Alibek Kakimov², Dejun Li¹, Qian Sun⁴, Liang Kou⁵, Zhanyuan Tian⁵, Le Shao⁵, Cheng Zhang⁵, Jiujun Zhang^{2

6}, Xueliang Sun^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Tianjin International Joint Research Centre of Surface Technology for Energy Storage Materials, Energy & Materials Engineering Centre, College of Physics and Materials Science, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.
² Xi'an Key Laboratory of New Energy Materials and Devices, Institute of Advanced Electrochemical Energy & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China.
³ State Center for International Cooperation on Designer Low-Carbon & Environmental Materials (CDLCEM), Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
⁴ Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
⁵ Shaanxi Coal Chemical Industry Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd., Xi'an, China.
⁶ Department of Chemistry, College of Sciences/Institute for Sustainable Energy, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Due to the shuttle effect and low conductivity of sulfur (S), it has been challenging to realize the application of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries with high performance and long cyclability. In this study, a high catalytic active CNTs@FeOOH composite is introduced as a functional interlayer for Li-S batteries. Interestingly, the existence of oxygen vacancy in FeOOH functions electrocatalyst and promotes the catalytic conversion of intercepted lithium polysulfides (LiPS). As a result, the optimized CNTs@FeOOH interlayer contributed to a high reversible capacity of 556 mAh g^-1 at 3,200 mA g^-1 over 350 cycles. This study demonstrates that enhanced catalytic effect can accelerate conversion efficiency of polysulfides, which is beneficial of boosting high performance Li-S batteries.

Keywords: CNTs@FeOOH; Li-S batteries; catalytic effect; oxygen vacancy; polysulfides.