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Nitrogen-doped carbon nanorods embedded with cobalt nanoparticles as separator coatings for high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries

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Abstract

Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) have a high theoretical specific capacity (1675 mAh/g) and are expected to replace lithium-ion batteries as a new generation of high-density energy storage devices. However, the existence of problems such as the “shuttle effect” causes an irreversible loss of LSB capacity. In view of this, carbon nanorods embedded with cobalt nanoparticles (Co-CNRs-CTAB) were successfully prepared through the high-temperature pyrolysis of prism-shaped polypyrrole loaded with zeolitic imidazolate framework-67 under the assistance of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), applied as commercial polypropylene (PP) separator modifiers to promote the rapid capture and redox conversion of soluble polysulfides for upgrading LSBs. The results show that the LSBs assembled with modified Co-CNRs-CTAB/PP separator have amazing electrochemical performance, involving a high initial mass specific capacity of 1091.8 mAh/g (1 C) and excellent cycling stability (594.7 mAh/g after 300 cycles at 3 C). Even at − 10 °C, the capacity attenuation of the LSBs per cycle is only 0.05% after 150 cycles. Therefore, this work provides an operationally simple and low-cost solution for improving the cycle life of LSBs.

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Funding

This work was supported financially by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (22208174), the New Colleges and Universities Twenty Foundational Projects of Jinan City (2021GXRC068), the Universities Youth Innovation Team Development Plan of Shandong Province (2023KJ140), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2022MB143), the Basic Research Projects of Science, Education, and Industry Integration Pilot Engineering of Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) (2023PY002), the Talent Research Projects of Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) (2023RCKY013), the 2023 Graduate Education and Teaching Reform Projects of Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) (24231601010415), and the Major Innovation Projects for Integrating Science, Education, and Industry of Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) (2022JBZ01-07).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, 250353, People’s Republic of China

    Huaming Yuan, Yunqiang Zhang, Yiming Lu, Xin Li, Ming Liu, Mei Li & Laiying Jing

  2. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, People’s Republic of China

    Jiaxi Cui

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  1. Huaming Yuan
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  4. Xin Li
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  7. Mei Li
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Contributions

H. Y. drafted the work and revised it critically for important intellectual content; Y. Z. made substantial contributions to the analysis of data; Y. L. and X. L. made substantial contributions to the acquisition of data; M. L.1 made substantial contributions to the interpretation of the data; J. C. made substantial contributions to manuscript revision and experimental analysis. M. L.2 and L. J. made substantial contributions to the conception and design of the work.

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Correspondence to Yunqiang Zhang, Mei Li or Laiying Jing.

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Yuan, H., Zhang, Y., Lu, Y. et al. Nitrogen-doped carbon nanorods embedded with cobalt nanoparticles as separator coatings for high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries. Ionics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11581-024-05471-y

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