Engineers developed a cathode material for lithium-sulfur batteries that is healable and highly conductive, overcoming longstanding challenges of traditional sulfur cathodes. The advance holds promise for bringing more energy dense and low-cost Li-S batteries closer to market.
To overcome these challenges, a team led by researchers at the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center developed a new cathode material: a crystal composed of sulfur and iodine. By inserting iodine molecules into the crystalline sulfur structure, the researchers drastically increased the cathode material's electrical conductivity by 11 orders of magnitude, making it 100 billion times more conductive than crystals made of sulfur alone.
"This sulfur-iodide cathode presents a unique concept for managing some of the main impediments to commercialization of Li-S batteries," said study co-senior author Shyue Ping Ong, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
"This discovery has the potential to solve one of the biggest challenges to the introduction of solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries by dramatically increasing the useful life of a battery," said study co-author Christopher Brooks, chief scientist at Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy , the U.S. DOE Office of Science .
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