Our Doctoral Candidate Publishes Groundbreaking Research Results in Nature Subjournal

Post Time：2024-05-14 Author：Lin Xuemei Picture: Wang Xinyue Point：10

A groundbreaking study on “Key Materials for Lithium-Sulfur Battery System” by the team led by Professor Song Yingze from the State Key Laboratory of Environment-friendly Energy Materials at SWUST has recently been published in Nature Communications. Yang Qin, a doctoral candidate of the 2020 academic year, was the first author, and Distinguished Professor Song Yingze was the co-corresponding author.

Lithium-sulfur battery is hailed as a highly promising next-generation energy storage system due to its exceptional theoretical energy density. However, it faces formidable challenges in practical application, including the lithium polysulfides shuttle effect, sluggish sulfur reaction kinetics, and lithium dendrite growth. To overcome these challenges, Song Yingze’s team has devised a revolutionary binuclear copper complex electrocatalyst featuring chlorine-bridged bonds. This innovative catalyst boasts two copper atoms intricately connected by a pair of symmetrical chlorine bridges, at a distance of only 3.5Å, forming a stable coordination environment with nitrogen and other atoms. It is found that this binuclear copper complex is able to break through the activity constraints of its mononuclear metal center through in situ Raman spectroscopy, COMSOL simulations, synchrotron X-ray 3D nanoimaging technology, small-angle neutron scattering characterization, and theoretical calculations. It efficiently optimizes the evolutionary reactions of the electrochemically active species of sulfur and lithium, therefore significantly improving the electrochemical performance of lithium-sulfur batteries.

This research not only introduces a novel electrocatalyst model for the lithium-sulfur battery system but also offers an approach to analyze the working mechanism of electrocatalysts, which is of great significance for the practical development of high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries in the future.

Yang Qin, a doctoral candidate in Materials Science and Engineering of the 2020 academic year, specializes in organic small molecule catalysis based on lithium-sulfur chemistry under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Song Yingze. Her research endeavors delve into the key scientific theories and technical methods for optimizing the electrode structure and performance of lithium-sulfur batteries, achieving a series of research achievements. To date, she has published five papers as the first author in prestigious journals such as Nature Communications, Chemical Engineering Journal, and Chemical Communications, and has also contributed to the application and transfer of one national invention patent as the second inventor.