A combination of MnO2-decorated graphene aerogel modified separator and I/N codoped graphene aerogel sulfur host to synergistically promote Li–S battery performance

Abstract The shuttle effect of dissoluble sulfurous intermediates is the bottleneck in developing durable Li–S batteries. It is crucial to confine sulfurous species in cathodic chamber for utmost suppression of the polysulfide shuttle. Herein, a dual-trapping policy is formulated to solve the issue. The MnO2-decorated graphene aerogel (MG) is applied to modify the Celgard separator, and the I/N codoped graphene aerogel (ING) is prepared as the cathode sulfur host. Both the MG@Sep separator and the ING/S cathode could efficiently capture polysulfides and promote the utilization of active sulfur. As a consequence, the tailored Li–S cell with the MG@Sep+ING/S combination shows durable cycle stability in addition to high initial capacity as well as capacity retention. The used electrodes and the separator are all in good conditions after 200 cycles, and no shuttled sulfurous species can be observed on the anode. Therefore, it is hopeful to impulse Li–S battery engineering by optimizing such a dual-trapping policy.