Interaction of CuS and Sulfur in Li-S Battery System

• Published in: Journal of the Electrochemical Society Vol. 162; no. 14; pp. A2834 - A2839
• Main Authors: Sun, Ke, Su, Dong, Zhang, Qing, Bock, David C., Marschilok, Amy C., Takeuchi, Kenneth J., Takeuchi, Esther S., Gan, Hong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States The Electrochemical Society 01.01.2015
• Subjects: conductive filler; copper sulfides; ENERGY STORAGE; hybrid electrode; lithium sulfur battery; polysulfide; SEI
• ISSN: 0013-4651; 1945-7111
• DOI: 10.1149/2.1021514jes

The Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) battery has been a subject of intensive research in recent years due to its potential to provide much higher energy density and lower cost than the current state of the art lithium-ion battery technology. In this work, we have investigated Cupric Sulfide (CuS) as a capacity-contributing conductive additive to the sulfur electrode in a Li-S battery. Galvanostatic charge/discharge cycling has been used to compare the performance of both sulfur electrodes and S:CuS hybrid electrodes with various ratios. We found that the conductive CuS additive enhanced the utilization of the sulfur cathode under a 1C rate discharge. However, under a C/10 discharge rate, S:CuS hybrid electrodes exhibited lower sulfur utilization in the first discharge and faster capacity decay in later cycles than a pure sulfur electrode due to the dissolution of CuS. The CuS dissolution is found to be the result of strong interaction between the soluble low order polysulfide Li2S3 and CuS. We identified the presence of conductive copper-containing sulfides at the cycled lithium anode surface, which may degrade the effectiveness of the passivation function of the solid-electrolyte-interphase (SEI) layer, accounting for the poor cycling performance of the S:CuS hybrid cells at low rate.