Long-life lithium-sulfur batteries with high areal capacity based on coaxial CNTs@TiN-TiO2 sponge

Rational design of heterostructures opens up new opportunities as an ideal catalyst system for lithium polysulfides conversion in lithium-sulfur battery. However, its traditional fabrication process is complex, which makes it difficult to reasonably control the content and distribution of each component. In this work, to rationally design the heterostructure, the atomic layer deposition is utilized to hybridize the TiO2-TiN heterostructure with the three-dimensional carbon nanotube sponge. Through optimizing the deposited thickness of TiO2 and TiN layers and adopting the annealing post-treatment, the derived coaxial sponge with uniform TiN-TiO2 heterostructure exhibits the best catalytic ability. The corresponding lithium-sulfur battery shows enhanced electrochemical performance with high specific capacity of 1289 mAh g−1 at 1 C and capacity retention of 85% after 500 cycles at 2 C. Furthermore, benefiting from the highly porous structure and interconnected conductive pathways from the sponge, its areal capacity reaches up to 21.5 mAh cm−2.