Analysis and prospect of positive catalyst and negative protective material for high energy lithium-sulfur batteries

Abstract

Lithium-sulfur(Li-S) batteries have emerged quite expeditiously as a fascinating energy storage system over the past decade due to their advantages of high energy density, low material cost and low environmental pollution. They have been considered as a promising secondary battery. In recent years, high-performance and long-life batteries urgently need to match well with high research requirements with the rapid development of electric vehicles.The advantages of lithium-sulfur batteries have shown a wide range of application prospects. However, how to improve the performance and life of batteries has attracted widespread attention. With the development of various types of efficient catalysts, lithium sulfur batteries show great development prospect. In this review, the latest advances in the application of heterostructure catalysts, single-atom catalysts and anode materials for high activity lithium-sulfur batteries were systematically stated and discussed. Among them, heterostructures can not only combine two materials with complementary or mutually reinforcing functions, but also have internal electric fields at the interface, which can effectively enhance the kinetics of polysulfides conversion reaction in Li-S batteries. Single-atom catalysts pave new strategies of solving these obstacles because of their decent applicability in the atomic-level identification of structureactivity relationships and reaction mechanism, as well as their structural tunability with atomic precision. Many efforts have proved that the designed anode materials can not only inhibit the shuttle of polysulfide, but also stabilize the surface of lithium metal.

Keywords

• lithium-sulfur batteries;;polysulfide conversion;;heterostructure;;single-atom catalysts;;anode materials