Regulating Polysulfide Conversion Kinetics Using Tungsten Diboride as Additive For High-Performance Li-S Battery.

The practical application of Li-S batteries is severely limited due to low sulfur utilization, sluggish sulfur redox kinetics, intermediate polysulfide dissolution/shuttling, and subsequent anode degradation. A smart cathode with efficient electrocatalyst and a protected anode is necessary. Herein, hollow carbon (HC) spheres are used as a sulfur host to improve the electrical conductivity and buffer the volume expansion of active materials.

Highly Efficient, Cost Effective, and Safe Sodiation Agent for High-Performance Sodium-Ion Batteries.

The development of sodium-ion batteries has been hindered so far by the large irreversible capacity of hard carbon anodes and other anode materials in the initial few cycles, as sodium ions coming from cathode materials is consumed in the formation of the solid-electrolyte interface (SEI) and irreversibly trapped in anodes. Herein, the successful synthesis of an environmentally benign and cost-effective sodium salt (Na C O ) is reported that could be applied as additive in cathodes to solve the irreversible-capacity issues of anodes in sodium-ion batteries. When added to Na (VO) (PO ) F cathode, the cathode delivered a highly stable capacity of 135 mAh g and stable cycling performance.

Exfoliated MoS2 Sheets and Reduced Graphene Oxide-An Excellent and Fast Anode for Sodium-ion Battery.

Three dimensional (3D) MoS2 nanoflowers are successfully synthesized by hydrothermal method. Further, a composite of as prepared MoS2 nanoflowers and rGO is constructed by simple ultrasonic exfoliation technique. The crystallography and morphological studies have been carried out by XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, HR-TEM and EDS etc.

New Ru(II)/Os(II)-polypyridyl complexes for coupling to TiO2 surfaces through acetylacetone functionality and studies on interfacial electron-transfer dynamics.

New Ru(ii)- and Os(ii)-polypyridyl complexes have been synthesized with pendant acetylacetone (acac) functionality for anchoring on nanoparticulate TiO2 surfaces with a goal of developing an alternate sensitizer that could be utilized for designing an efficient dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). Time-resolved transient absorption spectroscopic studies in the femtosecond time domain have been carried out. The charge recombination rates are observed to be very slow, compared with those for strongly coupled dye molecules having catechol as the anchoring functionality.