Electrocatalytically Active Niobium Sulfide Modified Carbon Cloth for Lithium–Sulfur Batteries

Abstract

We report a simple novel annealing technique for the synthesis of NbS2 nanoflakes. The synthesized NbS2 flakes were characterized well with different spectroscopic and microscopic techniques and confirmed they are in 3R-NbS2 polymorph structure, which is semiconducting in nature. Later, they were successfully deposited onto carbon cloth (CC) and tested for Li–S cell. Lithium–sulfur batteries suffer from polysulfide (PS) shuttling effects which hinder the performance of the cell. High capacity fade, slow redox kinetics, and the low cyclability of cells are just some of the many problems caused by the shuttling effect that hinder the viability of the battery. Herein, we utilized the catalytic nature of NbS2 along with the high conductivity of CC for better PS adsorption, their liquid to solid conversion, fast PS redox kinetics which substantially enhanced the overall Li–S performance.