Abstract:
The composition and structure of the host material in lithium-sulfur batteries are the main reasons for the differences in battery performance. An economical and environmentally friendly carbon-based host material is one of the most effective strategies for the practical application of lithium-sulfur batteries. In this paper, we employed an innovative method to prepare nitrogen-doped porous carbon nanosheets from the petiole of palm tree. A porous carbon material N-PPCNs with a stacked nano-sheet layer structure was synthesized by a simple urea soaking and chemical activation method. N-PPCNs achieved uniform doping of nitrogen elements, serving as a sulfur host material, which increased the adsorption energy for polysulfides and accelerated the conversion kinetics of polysulfides. The combined porous structure and effective nitrogen doping work together to suppress the “shuttle effect,” enabling the composite electrode to achieve a high specific capacity of
1257 mA h g
−1, and still maintain a specific capacity of 490 mA h g
−1 after 500 cycles at a rate of 1 C. This work fully demonstrates the potential for the reuse of waste biomass.