Ming Song,Xihua Du,Yan Chen,Lei Zhang,Ding Zhu,Yungui Chen
Among all the factors that restrict the application of Li–air battery, large charging polarization, due to the poor bulk charge transport ability of discharge product Li 2 O 2 , comes first. In this paper, we adopt the method of controlling discharging temperature to reduce the charging polarization during the first cycle of Li 2 O 2 based on the fact that controlling discharging temperature can reduce Li 2 O 2 bulk charge transport path since finer Li 2 O 2 particles can be observed at higher temperature. The mechanism of reducing charging polarization simply through increasing the discharging test temperature has also been researched in this paper.
Thermal batteries are solid-state, thermally activated batteries with long storage times and high reliability. FeS2 is used as a cathode material commonly, but the high internal resistance and low voltage platform limit the improvement of battery performance. Herein, the 1T-phase vanadium disulfide (VS2) is prepared via the scalable hydrothermal method and applied to thermal battery cathode materials for the first time. 1T-VS2 lamellar flower clusters have high electronic conductivity (1.583 S cm–1) at room temperature, which is 75 times higher than FeS2 (0.021 S cm–1). Mechanism analysis shows that 1T-VS2@V2O3 can be formed based on the part of 1T-VS2 being oxidized to V2O3 at the discharge temperature. Benefiting from the synergistic effect of vanadium sulfide and vanadium oxide as a cathode for thermal batteries enhanced specific capacity (292.4 mA h g–1) and mass energy density (572.5 W h kg–1) when cutoff voltage is 1 V. Additionally, the discharge results indicate that the cells utilizing 1T-VS2 cathodes provided a higher voltage platform of 2.11 V than 1.84 V for FeS2. This impressive work can offer a good strategy for boosting cathode materials for a high-performance thermal battery.