Efficient Ni₂V₂O₇ catalyst for high-performance Li -S batteries

Abstract

Although Li-S batteries have a high theoretical capacity, their application are significantly hindered by the complex shuttle effect of polysulfides. To address the issues, in this paper, Ni₂V₂O₇ prepared by a simple method is proposed as an efficient catalyst for S cathodes. Ni₂V₂O₇ composed of Ni-O octahedra and V-O tetrahedra has a specific electronic structure. The Ni and V atoms interacted, enabling a fast kinetics of polysulfide redox. Moreover, Ni₂V₂O₇ contains metal sites (Ni and V) and oxygen vacancies, providing a high adsorption capacity and abundant active sites for polysulfide redox. Therefore, Li-S batteries consisting of Ni₂V₂O₇-based cathodes exhibit an excellent cycling stability with a capacity of 1061 mAh g⁻¹ and capacity retention of 87.6% after 150 cycles at 0.2 C. Moreover, at 1 C rate, the batteries exhibit a capacity of 706 mAh g⁻¹ after 300 cycles with a minimal capacity decay of only 0.08% per cycle.

Keywords

Ni₂V₂O₇ / Li-S batteries / Catalyst / Adsorption

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hengxue Zhou: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Jialiang Wang: Conceptualization. Yeba Yan: Conceptualization. Yue Fang: Conceptualization. Yi Long: Conceptualization. Bo Liang: Conceptualization. Yingbang Yao: Conceptualization. Shengguo Lu: Conceptualization. Tao Tao: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Materials and Technology for Energy Conversion (Grant No. MATEC2023KF010), and Guangdong Basic, Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant No. 2022A1515010015).

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