A novel battery separator coated by a europium oxide/carbon nanocomposite enhances the performance of lithium sulfur batteries

Abstract

Lithium sulfur (Li–S) batteries represent one of the most promising future power batteries due to their remarkable advantages of low cost and ultrahigh theoretical energy density. However, the commercial applications of Li–S batteries have long been plagued by the shuttling effect of polysulfides and sluggish redox kinetics of these species. Herein, we designed a novel battery separator coated by a europium oxide-doped porous Ketjen Black (Eu₂O₃/KB) and tested its performance for the Li–S batteries for the first time. Experimental results and theoretical calculations reveal that the improved electrochemical performance can be attributed to the presence of Eu₂O₃. The strong binding effect between Eu₂O₃ and polysulfides is demonstrated in two aspects: (1) there exist strong interactions between Eu₂O₃ as a Lewis acid and polysulfides of strong Lewis basicity; (2) Eu₂O₃ with oxygen-vacancy defects provides active sites for catalyzing polysulfide conversion and polysulfide trapping. Thus, a Li–S battery with the Eu₂O₃/KB modified separator delivers highly stable cycling performance and excellent rate capability, with the capacity decay ratio of merely 0.05% per cycle under 1 C rate during 500 cycles, and high specific capacity of 563 mAh g⁻¹ at 3 C rate. This work offers a meaningful exploration of the application of rare earth oxides for the modification of the separator towards high performance Li–S batteries.