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Research Article

Oxygen defects boost polysulfides immobilization and catalytic conversion: First-principles computational characterization and experimental design

Qiu He1, Bin Yu1, Huan Wang1, Masud Rana2, Xiaobin Liao1, Yan Zhao1,3( )
State Key Laboratory of Silicate Materials for Architectures, International School of Materials Science and Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
Materials Engineering, School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
The Institute of Technological Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
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Abstract

Although some experiments have shown that point defects in a cathode host material may enhance its performance for lithium-sulfur battery (LSB), the enhancement mechanism needs to be well investigated for the design of desired sulfur host. Herein, the first principle density functional theory (DFT) is adopted to investigate a high-performance sulfur host material based on oxygen-defective TiO2 (D-TiO2). The adsorption energy comparisons and Gibbs free energy analyses verify that D-TiO2 has relatively better performances than defect-free TiO2 in terms of anchoring effect and catalytic conversion of polysulfides. Meanwhile, D-TiO2 is capable of absorbing the most soluble and diffusive long-chain polysulfides. The newly designed D-TiO2 composited with three-dimensional graphene aerogel (D-TiO2@Gr) has been shown to be an excellent sulfur host, maintaining a specific discharge capacity of 1,049.3 mAh·g-1 after 100 cycles at 1C with a sulfur loading of 3.2 mg·cm-2. Even with the sulfur mass loading increasing to 13.7 mg·cm-2, an impressive stable cycling is obtained with an initial areal capacity of 14.6 mAh·cm-2, confirming the effective enhancement of electrochemical performance by the oxygen defects. The DFT calculations shed lights on the enhancement mechanism of the oxygen defects and provide some guidance for designing advanced sulfur host materials.

Keywords

oxygen defectscatalytic conversionlithium-sulfur batterydensity functional theory

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Nano Research
Volume 13 Issue 8,
August 2020
Pages 2299-2307
DOI: 10.1007/s12274-020-2850-5
Cite this article:
He Q, Yu B, Wang H, et al. Oxygen defects boost polysulfides immobilization and catalytic conversion: First-principles computational characterization and experimental design. Nano Research, 2020, 13(8): 2299-2307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2850-5
Topics:
AerogelsCalculationsComputation theory Density functional theoryFree energy Lithium batteriesLithium sulfur batteriesPolysulfides

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Received: 19 December 2019
Revised: 16 April 2020
Accepted: 02 May 2020
Published: 05 August 2020
© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
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