Pre-carbonizing nickel-metal organic frameworks for enabling lithium–sulfur reactions

Abstract

Metal-organic frameworks, as a type of porous architectures, have caught wide attentions for their pore-rich and special metal-active centres. However, the non-conductive MOFs show the limitations in lithium–sulfur batteries (LSBs). Herein, we first synthesized a lamellar nickel-based MOFs and subsequently conducted pre-carbonization for attaining conductive Ni-carbon (Ni@C) catalyst. On account of the retained three dimensional architectures and elevated conductivity, Ni@C as the interlayer can realize a polysulfide-regulated and kinetically promoted LSBs. This work offers a viable strategy to extend the implementation of MOFs in state-of-the-art LSB systems.