Although lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have high theoretical capacity and energy density, the shuttle phenomenon in which intermediate lithium polysulfides continuously diffuse into the lithium metal electrode and react them causes the irreversible capacity deterioration. As a result, these shuttle effect inhibits the commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries. Therefore, this work utilized the carbon source acquired from the pyrolysis waste plastic as sulfur host material to mitigate the shuttle phenomenon. The KOH and subsequent ammonia treatment were conducted to improve the structure characteristics, which attempts leaded to the hierarchical porous carbon material with more than 30% mesopores among total pore volume for effective reaction active sites. Also, ammonia treatment to improve the chemical properties formed the TiO2-x and edge-posited nitrogen such and pyridinic-N and pyrrolic-N, which minimized active material departure based on the strong chemical bond with lithium polysulfides. The carbon host materials derived from pyrolysis waste plastics could contribute to reduce the decay of capacity based on the superior interaction ability with TiO2-x and nitrogen atoms, which resulted in the high specific capacity of 500 mAh/g by 500th cycle at 1.0 C current density and very low capacity decay ratio of 0.089%. Therefore, this study can be a precedent for the practical eco-friendly design of waste plastic residues as a carbon source.

N-doped hierarchical carbon material derived from pyrolytic waste plastics for the sulfur host of lithium-sulfur battery

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