Ronan Oskar, Downing Clive, Nicolosi Valeria
Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Open Res Eur. 2022 Feb 1;2:1. doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.14378.2. eCollection 2022.
Lithium-sulfur battery is one of promising candidates for next-generation energy storage device due to the sulfur cathode material with low cost and nontoxicity, and super high theoretical energy density (nearly 2600Wh kg ) and specific energy (2567Wh kg ). Sulphur, however, poses a few interesting challenges before it can gain widespread utilisation. The biggest issue is known as the polysulphide shuttling effect which contributes to rapid capacity loss after cycling. Accurate characterisation of sulphur cathodic materials becomes critical to our understanding polysulphide shuttling effect in the quest of finding mitigating solutions. Electron microscopy is playing a crucial role in battery research in determining structure-property-function relations. However, sulphur undergoes sublimation at a point above the typical pressures found in the column of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) at room temperature. This makes the imaging and characterisation of any sort of nanostructured sulphur samples challenging, as the material will be modified or even disappear rapidly as soon as it is inserted into the TEM vacuum. As a result, materials characterised by such methods are prone to deviation from normal conditions to a great extent. To prevent this, a novel method of encapsulating sulphur particles between silicon nitride (SiN ) membranes is demonstrated in this work.
锂硫电池是下一代储能设备中颇具潜力的候选者之一，这归因于硫阴极材料成本低、无毒，且具有超高的理论能量密度（接近2600Wh/kg）和比能量（2567Wh/kg）。然而，在硫能够得到广泛应用之前，它面临着一些有趣的挑战。最大的问题是所谓的多硫化物穿梭效应，这导致电池循环后容量迅速损失。准确表征硫阴极材料对于我们理解多硫化物穿梭效应以寻求缓解解决方案至关重要。电子显微镜在电池研究中对于确定结构-性能-功能关系起着关键作用。然而，在室温下，硫在高于透射电子显微镜（TEM）柱内典型压力的某一点会发生升华。这使得对任何类型的纳米结构硫样品进行成像和表征都具有挑战性，因为一旦将材料插入TEM真空环境中，它就会迅速被改变甚至消失。因此，用这种方法表征的材料在很大程度上容易偏离正常条件。为了防止这种情况，本文展示了一种在氮化硅（SiN）膜之间封装硫颗粒的新方法。
