Tunable vacancy defect chemistry on free-standing carbon cathode for lithium-sulfur batteries

The defect chemistry is successfully modulated on free-standing and binder-free carbon cathodes for highly efficient Li-S redox reactions. Such rationally regulated defect engineering realizes the synchronization of ion/electron-conductive and defect-rich networks on the three -dimension carbon cathode, leading to its tunable activity for both relieving the shuttle phenomenon and accelerating the sulfur redox reaction kinetics. As expected, the defective carbon cathode harvests a high rate capacity of 1217.8 mAh g-1 at 0.2 C and a superior capacity retention of 61.7% at 2 C after 500 cycles. Even under the sulfur mass loading of 11.1 mg cm -2, the defective cathode still holds a remarkable areal capacity of 8.5 mAh cm -2.(c) 2022 Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communi-cations Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).