Superfast and solvent-free core-shell assembly of sulfur/carbon active particles by hail-inspired nanostorm technology for high-energy-density Li-S batteries

The demand on low-carbon emission fabrication technologies for energy storage materials is increasing dramatically with the global interest on carbon neutrality. As a promising active material for metal-sulfur batteries, sulfur is of great interest due to its high-energy-density and abundance. However, there is a lack of industry-friendly and low-carbon fabrication strategies for high-performance sulfur-based active particles, which, however, is in critical need by their practical success. Herein, based on a hail-inspired sulfur nano-storm (HSN) technology developed in our lab, we report an energy-saving, solvent-free strategy for producing core-shell sulfur/carbon electrode particles (CNT@AC-S) in minutes. The fabrication of the CNT@AC-S electrode particles only involves low-cost sulfur blocks, commercial carbon nanotubes (CNT) and activated carbon (AC) micro-particles with high specific surface area. Based on the above core-shell CNT@AC-S particles, sulfur cathode with a high sulfur-loading of 9.2 mg cm(-2) delivers a stable area capacity of 6.6 mAh cm(-2) over 100 cycles. Furthermore, even for sulfur cathode with a super-high sulfur content (72 wt% over the whole electrode), it still delivers a high area capacity of 9 mAh cm(-2) over 50 cycles in a quasi-lean electrolyte condition. In a nutshell, this study brings a green and industryfriendly fabrication strategy for cost-effective production of rationally designed S-rich electrode particles. (C) 2021 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. and Science Press. All rights reserved.