Lithium sufur batteries are among the most promising next generation battery systems due to the high capacity properties of sulfur as cathodic material. Beyond its interesting intrinsic properties, sulfur possesses a very low conductivity and complex electrochemistry which involves the high solubility of the lithium sulfides in the electrolyte. These two characteristics trigger a series of limitations on its performance as active cathode material which leads to batteries with low cyclability. Recently, inverse vulcanizated sulfur has shown to retain capacity far better than elemental sulfur leading to batteries with excellent cyclability. Nevertheless the diene comonomers used so far in the inverse vulcanization process are synthetic sourced molecules. Herein a tentative work on exploring inverse vulcanization with two natural sourced monomers, diallyl sulfide and myrcene is presented. The inverse vulcanization of sulfur was succesfully completed and the resulting polymers were characterized by FTIR, NMR, DSC and TGA. Afterwards these polymers were tested as cathodic materieals in lithium-sulfur cells. The sulfur-natural dienes materials exhibited high capacity at different C-rates and high lifetime over 200 cycles with very high capacity retention at a moderate C-rate of C/5. Altogether, these materials made by cheap and abundant chemicals are an excellent option of sustainable materials for electrochemical energy storage.

Exploring inverse vulcanization of sulfur with natural source monomers as cathodic materials for long life lithium sulfur batteries

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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