Stabilizing Li–S Battery Through Multilayer Encapsulation of Sulfur.

Advancements in portable electronic devices and electric powered transportation has drawn more attention to high energy density batteries, especially lithium–sulfur batteries due to the low cost of sulfur and its high energy density. However, the lithium–sulfur battery is still quite far from commercialization mostly because of incompatibility between all major components of the battery—the cathode, anode, and electrolyte. Here a methodology is demonstrated that shows promise in significantly improving battery stability by multilayer encapsulation of sulfur particles, while using conventional electrolytes, which allows a long cycle life and an improved Coulombic efficiency battery at low electrolyte feeding. The multilayer encapsulated sulfur battery demonstrates a Coulombic efficiency as high as 98%, when a binder‐free electrode is used. It is also shown that the all‐out self‐discharge of the cell after 168 h can be reduced from 34% in the regular sulfur battery to less than 9% in the battery with the multilayer encapsulated sulfur electrode. A stable lithium sulfur battery is enabled by a multilayer encapsulated sulfur nanocomposite electrode. The inner coating layer is a metal‐oxide capable of anchoring long‐chain polysulfides and the outer coating layer is a conductive porous polymer resulting in a battery with more than 500 cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]