Pyrolyzed bacterial cellulose/graphene oxide sandwich interlayer for lithium-sulfur batteries

Herein, a facile strategy for the synthesis of sandwich pyrolyzed bacterial cellulose (PBC)/graphene oxide (GO) composite was reported simply by utilizing the large-scale regenerated biomass bacterial cellulose as precursor. The unique and delicate structure where three-dimensional interconnected bacterial cellulose (BC) network embedded in two-dimensional GO skeleton could not only work as an effective barrier to retard polysulfide diffusion during the charge/discharge process to enhance the cyclic stability of the Li-S battery, but also offer a continuous electron transport pathway for the improved rate capability. As a result, by utilizing pure sulfur as cathodes, the Li-S batteries assembled with PBC/GO interlayer can still exhibit a capacity of nearly 600 mAh.g(-1) at 3C and only 0.055% capacity decay per cycle can be observed over 200 cycles. Additionally, the cost-efficient and environment-friendly raw materials may enable the PBC/GO sandwich interlayer to be an advanced configuration for Li-S batteries.