Conductive inks composed of multicomponent carbon nanomaterials and hydrophilic polymer binders for high-energy-density lithium-sulfur batteries

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery research has been greatly advanced through designing sulfur host materials. However, the vast majority of these host materials are not yet used for the construction of high-energy-density batteries, due to the lack of effective ways to fabricate high-performance cathodes under high-sulfur-loading conditions. Here we present a convenient and universal strategy toward traditional slurry-coating procedure for fabricating high-sulfur-loading cathodes. Through rational designing conductive additives and polymer binders, their derived water-based conductive inks are developed to improve the mechanical and conductive properties of the slurry-coating cathodes and to reduce the polysulfide shuttling of the slurry-coating cathodes with high sulfur content (64–72 wt%) and high sulfur loading (>5 mg cm−2). This strategy not only enables the Super-P/S cathodes to deliver the enhanced structure parameters and electrochemical performance for constructing a 2.5 Ah pouch cell with a specific energy of 323 Wh kg−1, but also is suitable for diverse lab-developed sulfur hosts, thus opening a promising avenue for high-energy-density Li-S batteries.