Designing Strong Interface of Cubic-like Sn–Co–S@carbon with SnO2 as Catalyst for Enhanced Li/Na-Ion Storage Abilities

As potential candidates, metal sulfides display strong storage abilities but suffer from serious volume swelling and polysulfide shuttling. Especially rich-sulfur materials, inferior reversible conversion reactions (from MS 2 to MS with S) can bring about major formation of sulfur. Herein, cubic-like Sn–Co–S materials with SnO 2 as catalyst are designed with various dimensional carbon. The as-resulted samples display uniform distributed particle size (≈5 µm), while cross-linked Sn–Co–S@carbon is successfully formed due to its rich surficial groups. Significantly, the formation of chemical bonds about Sn/Co–S–C is noted, facilitating ions/e-transfering and architecture enhancing. Meanwhile, owing to the endothermic effect of carbon, SnO 2 finally resulted, effectively limiting the so-called “shuttling effect” of polysulfide. Utilized as sodium-ion anodes, the optimized samples can deliver a capacity of 490 mAh g −1 at 0.5 A g −1 and ≈400 mAh g −1 above at 5.0 A g −1 . Assisted by the detailed kinetic analysis, it can be confirmed that the improvements of surface-controlling behaviors mainly come from the interfacial chemical bonds and strong-polar metal-oxides bonds. This work is expected to illustrate the roles of interfacial design and metal oxide catalysts for advanced energy storage materials.