Issue 32, 2019

Control of formation of viscoelastic droplets and distribution of nano-inclusions in functional deposition for lithium–sulfur batteries

Abstract

The electrospray process produces micro/nanodroplets for various applications such as thin and uniform coatings, drug carriers and mass spectrometry. In this paper, we study the spray processes of viscoelastic jets using simulations and experiments. In discretized modeling, the jet is perturbed with axisymmetric instability and the growth of this instability causes the jet to break into droplets. For the experiments, a solution of polyvinyl alcohol in water is sprayed and is visualized using a high-speed camera. The droplet size distribution is studied from simulations with experiments for three spray cases: electrospray, air spray, and air-controlled electrospray. Our simulations and experiments reveal that the electric field is effective in reducing the droplet size, while air flow offers more jet break-ups and thus a larger number of droplets. As a result, air-controlled electrospray where these two driving forces are synergistically combined leads to a larger number of smaller droplets than electrospray or air spray. Finally, we applied three spray processes to obtain a deposition of sulfur/mesoporous carbon/graphene/polymer binder composites as a lithium sulfur battery cathode and demonstrated that air-controlled electrospray leads to a higher capacity and rate capability than other processes, exhibiting 800 mA h g−1 at 0.5C and 600 mA h g−1 at 2C.

Graphical abstract: Control of formation of viscoelastic droplets and distribution of nano-inclusions in functional deposition for lithium–sulfur batteries

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
18 Jun 2019
Accepted
19 Jul 2019
First published
01 Aug 2019

Soft Matter, 2019,15, 6485-6494

Author version available

Control of formation of viscoelastic droplets and distribution of nano-inclusions in functional deposition for lithium–sulfur batteries

M. J. Divvela, R. Zhang, Y. Zhmayev, S. Pinge, J. H. Lee, S. W. Kim and Y. L. Joo, Soft Matter, 2019, 15, 6485 DOI: 10.1039/C9SM01212E

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