Single‐Atom Cobalt Catalyst Boosting Reaction Kinetics in Li–Organosulfur Battery

Abstract

AbstractOrganosulfur compounds are regarded as a kind of prospective cathode materials for lithium batteries due to their high theoretical specific capacity. However, they still suffer from the issues of sluggish redox kinetics and low utilization. The rational design of the cathode host for effectively confining active materials and accelerating the sluggish sulfur kinetics is an effective strategy. Herein, the study synthesizes an atomic‐scale single‐atom cobalt catalyst and interweave it with CNTs to fabricate an ideal host material (donated as CoSANC@CNTs) for the cathode in Li–PTS batteries. Electrochemical measurements reveal that CoSANC not only efficiently accelerates the redox kinetics in the whole reaction process but also shows excellent adsorption capacity, which is corroborated by the theoretical calculation results as well. As excepted, the Li–PTS battery equipped with CoSANC@CNTs electrode delivers an outstanding long cycling stability with a high initial specific capacity of 550.2 mAh g−1 and a slow capacity decay rate of 0.05% per cycle over 700 cycles at 1 C. Even under a high PTS loading of 8.6 mg cm−2, the PTS/CoSANC@CNTs cathode is still maintained with an excellent capacity retention of 91.1% at 0.1 C after 50 cycles.