Vanadium carbide nanoparticles incorporation in carbon nanofibers for room-temperature sodium sulfur batteries: Confining, trapping, and catalyzing

Rechargeable Aluminium–Sulfur Battery with Improved Electrochemical Performance by Cobalt‐Containing Electrocatalyst

“…Symmetric cells that contain identical electrodes on both sides of the cell have been widely applied to evaluate the catalytic effects in the electrochemical conversion reactions of sulfur in both the Li-S and sodium-sulfur batteries. [13,[17][18][19] Here we assembled three types of symmetric cells: 1) the S@C-cell that consists of carbon matrix-anchored sulfur composites (S@C) as both the positive and negative electrodes; 2) the S@C/Co-electrolyte-cell, in which the electrodes are the S@C composites and the electrolyte contains 1.0 wt. % anhydrous CoCl 2 ; 3) the S@Co/C-cell that was assembled with the electrodes consist of elemental sulfur loading in cobalt decorated carbon matrix (Co: C atom ratio of 1:10).…”

Progress and innovation of nanostructured sulfur cathodes and metal-free anodes for room-temperature Na–S batteries

“…Therefore, a cycling stability of 2000 cycles was achieved. In the same way, a cathode with high capacity retention of 96.2% after 2000 cycles was presented by Tang and co-workers [12]. The electrode described is a three-dimensional self-supported structure with vanadium carbide nanoparticles embedded in carbon nanofibers.…”

“…Since these compounds are promising regarding efficient batteries, increased understanding of the mechanism of the electrocatalytic processes is essential to further develop cathode materials containing metallic species. As noted above, Tang et al [12] reported that vanadium carbide nanoparticles capture longchain polysulfides and convert them into short-chain polysulfides through the catalytic mechanism schematically shown in Figure 6D. First, the vanadium carbide-carbon nanofibers (VC-CNFs) composite acts as electrocatalyst for oxidizing polysulfides to thiosulfate.…”

“…Additionally, sulfur cathodes exhibit other advantages such as low operating voltages (1.81 V vs Na/Na + ) and improved safety and low toxicity compared with transition-metal compounds in lithium-ion batteries [ 11 ]. Consequently, sodium–sulfur (Na–S) batteries have attracted renewed attention over the last decade due to their low cost and comparable chemistry with Li–S and LiB batteries, which would facilitate the large-scale production of Na–S batteries [ 3 , 12 ]. In fact, research on Na batteries is not new, starting with high-temperature (HT) Na–S batteries in the 1960s and RT sodium-ion batteries (SiBs) in the 1980s [ 10 ].…”

Recent Advances in Emerging Non‐Lithium Metal–Sulfur Batteries: A Review

“…In contrast, metal and metal compounds show high chemical adsorption capabilities with intermediate polysulfides. [88][89][90] Therefore, a more reasonable approach is to design hybrid hosts that combine highly conductive carbonaceous materials with highly polar compounds such as metals, [91][92][93][94][95] metal oxides, [96,97] metal sulfides, [98][99][100][101][102] metal carbides, [103,104] metal phosphides, [105] and metal oxyhydroxides. [106] Taking molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) as a typical example; Xu et al prepared a sulfur carrier of hollow carbon spheres decorated with MoS 2 nanosheets (Figure 7a).…”