Low-Cost Organodisulfide Polymer for Ultrafast High-Capacity Cathode Materials

• Published in: ACS applied energy materials Vol. 6; no. 16; pp. 8479 - 8488
• Main Authors: Zeng, Shao-Zhong, Wang, Shuxiao, Kong, Ling Bing, Tian, Yuchao, He, Bin, Yu, Xiao, Niu, Shuzhang, Fu, Dongju, Han, Peigang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 28.08.2023
• Subjects: organic electrode materials; disulfide bond; organodisulfide polymers; high energy/power density; graphene
• ISSN: 2574-0962; 2574-0962
• DOI: 10.1021/acsaem.3c01307

Traditional inorganic cathode materials are currently facing serious technical bottlenecks due to the use of transition metals with limited resources (such as Co and Ni) and a relatively low specific capacity (<300 mAh g–1). Organic cathode materials have no resource problem and a large theoretical specific capacity (up to 1000 mAh g–1), simply because they only contain extremely rich and light elements, such as C, N, O, S, and H. Meanwhile, they have broad design and development space, owing to the variety of functional groups with lithiation activity. However, organic cathode materials also have issues in terms of practical applications, such as the dissolution and loss of active substances and low conductivity. For most of the polymers that aim to solve these problems, the raw materials are expensive, and the synthesis process is complicated. Moreover, their theoretical specific capacity is usually below 200 mAh g–1. Herein, we report a low-cost organic disulfide polymer with a theoretical specific capacity of 462 mAh g–1. After incorporation with graphene, this polymer has excellent high rate performance in ether electrolytes. It has an energy density of 1070 Wh kg–1 at a power density of 185 W kg–1. Even at a power density of 33,280 W kg–1 (40 C), the energy density still remains at 200 Wh kg–1, while the specific capacity is retained at 57% after 10,000 cycles at 40 C.