High-performance lithium/sulfur batteries by decorating CMK-3/S cathodes with DNAElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available: The computational details, SEM images, TG-DSC measurements of the thermal stability of pure DNA and calculations for sulfur loading in different samples, BET results, Coulombic efficiency, and fitted values for the equivalent circuit elements in the EIS data. See DOI: 10.1039/c4ta06083k

• Main Authors: Li, Qiyang, Zhou, Chenggang, Ji, Zhuan, Han, Bo, Feng, Liang, Wu, Jinping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 24.03.2015
• ISSN: 2050-7488; 2050-7496
• DOI: 10.1039/c4ta06083k

Prohibiting lithium polysulfides from being dissolved to electrolyte is the most critical challenge for pursuing high-performance Li/S batteries. Taking full advantage of interactions between polysulfides and functional groups of third-party additives has been proven to be an efficient strategy. In the present work, we selected DNA to decorate CMK-3/S cathodes. The -P&z.dbd;O and &z.dbd;N- sites of the constituent deoxyribonucleotides of DNA are demonstrated to be capable of anchoring polysulfides through our DFT calculations. The experimental results show that adding a small amount of DNA into the CMK-3/S composite significantly improved the cyclic performance. In particular, with a moderate DNA loading rate, the DNA post-loading procedure resulted in a discharge capacity of 771 mA h g −1 at 0.1 C after 200 cycles (70.7% retention of the initial), which yielded slightly improved performance as compared to the DNA pre-loading procedure. The proposed DNA decorating scheme may provide an applicable technical solution for developing high-performance Li/S batteries. A small quantity of DNA incorporated into a CMK-3/S cathode anchors soluble polysulfides for considerable improvement in the cycling performance of Li/S batteries.