Despite the promise of surface engineering to address the challenge of polysulfide shuttling in sulfur-carbon composite cathodes, melt infiltration techniques limit mechanistic studies correlating engineered surfaces and polysulfide anchoring. Here, we present a controlled experimental demonstration of polysulfide anchoring using vapor phase isothermal processing to fill the interior of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) after assembly into binder-free electrodes and atomic layer deposition (ALD) coating of polar V2O5 anchoring layers on the CNT surfaces. The ultrathin submonolayer V2O5 coating on the CNT exterior surface balances the adverse effect of polysulfide shuttling with the necessity for high sulfur utilization due to binding sites near the conductive CNT surface. The sulfur loaded into the CNT interior provides a spatially separated control volume enabling high sulfur loading with direct sulfur-CNT electrical contact for efficient sulfur conversion. By controlling ALD coating thickness, high initial discharge capacity of 1209 mAh/gS at 0.1 C and exceptional cycling at 0.2 C with 87% capacity retention after 100 cycles and 73% at 450 cycles is achieved and correlated to an optimal V2O5 anchoring layer thickness. This provides experimental evidence that surface engineering approaches can be effective to overcome polysulfide shuttling by controlled design of molecular-scale building blocks for efficient binder free lithium sulfur battery cathodes.
Keywords: atomic layer deposition; carbon nanotubes; lithium sulfur battery; polysulfide shuttling; vanadium pentoxide.