(Correspondent: Xue Wenxuan) Recently, Professor Wang Shuai's team from the School of Chemistry and Environmental Engineering of Wuhan Institute of Technology published a research paper titled "Phosphorus-Pinned Sulfur Vacancies Stabilize Heterointerfaces for High-performance Li-S Batteries" in the international top journal Advanced Functional Materials (a CAS Tier 1 TOP journal with an impact factor of 19.0). Wuhan Institute of Technology is the first affiliated institution of the paper, and Professor Wang Shuai is the corresponding author.
Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) are widely recognized as one of the most promising candidates for next-generation high-energy-density energy storage systems due to their high theoretical capacity (1675 mAh g⁻¹), low cost, and environmental friendliness. However, the "shuttle effect" of polysulfides and the sluggish sulfur redox kinetics seriously restrict their practical application. Heterojunction electrocatalysts have attracted much attention because of their tunable electronic structures and abundant active sites, but the thermodynamic instability caused by excessive defect sites at the interface often leads to continuous degradation of catalytic performance.
To address this bottleneck, Professor Wang Shuai's team innovatively proposed a phosphorus-pinned sulfur vacancy strategy and successfully constructed a carbon-coated CoS2-FeS2 heterojunction catalyst (P-VS-CFS@C). By having P³⁻ ions selectively occupy part of the pre-constructed sulfur vacancies, the research team not only effectively passivated the vacancy structure and suppressed the interfacial trap effect, but also significantly enhanced the adsorption capacity for polysulfides. Density functional theory calculations showed that the introduction of phosphorus modulated the local charge redistribution, generated spin-polarized states near the Fermi level, and significantly reduced the energy barrier of the rate-determining step Li2S2 → Li2S. Benefiting from this innovative interfacial stabilization design, the P-VS-CFS@C cathode exhibited excellent electrochemical performance: it still delivered a capacity of 784.1 mAh g⁻¹ at a high rate of 5 C; after 1000 long cycles at a current density of 1 C, the capacity retention rate reached 84%. Even under conditions of high sulfur loading and lean electrolyte, the cathode still showed excellent rate performance and cycling stability, demonstrating its great potential in practical applications. This work provides new ideas and theoretical guidance for balancing the activity and durability of electrocatalysts for next-generation energy storage.
In recent years, the university has taken talent cultivation as its core driver, focused on advancing first-class discipline construction, strongly driven scientific research innovation and development, and continuously achieved high-level scientific research results. The publication of Professor Wang Shuai's research results fully demonstrates the solid effectiveness of talent cultivation in the construction of the university's basic chemistry discipline, helps enhance the international academic influence of chemistry and related disciplines, and provides strong support for the construction of "first-class disciplines."
Wang Shuai is a professor, doctoral supervisor, academician of the Russian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, deputy director of the China Energy Society, and a scholar of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He has won the London International Invention Gold Award and Platinum Award. He has undertaken projects of the National Disruptive Plan, the National Key R&D Program, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and has been awarded the Ministry of Education's "Cross-Century Outstanding Talents" and Hubei Province's "Chutian Scholar Distinguished Professor." He is mainly engaged in research on organic optoelectronic materials, phosphorus-based functional materials, and flexible electronic devices, and has proposed and developed "confined printing technology" and "atomic printing manufacturing" to regulate the physical/chemical behavior of materials through confinement effects. The technology has been widely used in domestic and foreign scientific research institutions and applied to printing manufacturing and atomic manufacturing in the trillion-level OLED display industry, promoting the development of new optoelectronic display and atomic manufacturing technologies, and has been reported by CCTV.com, People's Daily, and Xinhua Net. He has published more than 130 papers in journals such as Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Science Bulletin. (Reviewed by Yu Junxia)
