Modified Separator Using Thin Carbon Layer Obtained from Its Cathode for Advanced Lithium Sulfur Batteries

The realization of a practical lithium sulfur battery system, despite its high theoretical specific capacity, is severely limited by fast capacity decay, which is mainly attributed to polysulfide dissolution and shuttle effect. To address this issue, we designed a thin cathode inactive material interlayer modified separator to block polysulfides. There are two advantages for this strategy. First, the coating material totally comes from the cathode, thus avoids the additional weights involved. Second, the cathode inactive material modified separator improve the reversible capacity and cycle performance by combining gelatin to chemically bond polysulfides and the carbon layer to physically block polysulfides. The research results confirm that with the cathode inactive material modified separator, the batteries retain a reversible capacity of 644 mAh g–1 after 150 cycles, showing a low capacity decay of about 0.11% per circle at the rate of 0.5C.