RESUMO
Polysulfide binding and trapping to prevent dissolution into the electrolyte by a variety of materials has been well studied in Li-S batteries. Here we discover that some of those materials can play an important role as an activation catalyst to facilitate oxidation of the discharge product, Li2S, back to the charge product, sulfur. Combining theoretical calculations and experimental design, we select a series of metal sulfides as a model system to identify the key parameters in determining the energy barrier for Li2S oxidation and polysulfide adsorption. We demonstrate that the Li2S decomposition energy barrier is associated with the binding between isolated Li ions and the sulfur in sulfides; this is the main reason that sulfide materials can induce lower overpotential compared with commonly used carbon materials. Fundamental understanding of this reaction process is a crucial step toward rational design and screening of materials to achieve high reversible capacity and long cycle life in Li-S batteries.
RESUMO
In this study, CoNi flower-like hierarchical microstructures with different sizes were obtained via a one-step solvothermal method by simply adjusting the concentration of precursors and surfactant. The obtained CoNi microflowers possess uniform and tunable size, good monodispersity, and remarkable magnetic microwave absorption properties as well as electron holography phase images. Characterization results have demonstrated the dependency of properties of CoNi microflowers on their morphologies and sizes. The microflowers exhibit different stray magnetic fields that might be determined by whether the pristine nanoflakes on the flowers' surface was parallel or perpendicular to grid plane. And as the size of microflowers increased, the coercive force (Hc) value decreased while saturation magnetization (Ms) value gradually increased, and it can be also observed that the values of Ms and Hc at 5 K are higher than those at 300 K. In addition, the blocking temperature decreased when size increased. Typically, the 2.5 µm CoNi microflowers achieve the maximum reflection loss (RL) value of -28.5 dB at 6.8 GHz with a thickness of 2 mm, while on the other hand, the 0.6 µm flowers achieved a broader absorption bandwidth below -10 dB of 6.5 GHz. Therefore, it is believable that the CoNi flowers with different sizes and hierarchical structures in this work have great potential for high performance magnetic microwave absorption applications.
