Chapter 350: The Dawn Of The Lithium-Sulfur Era

Translator: Henyee Translations  Editor: Henyee Translations

After dealing with Wei Wen, Lu Zhou went back to his office and began to prepare his PowerPoint report.

He spent a week working on the “theoretical model of electrochemical interface structure”.

When Lu Zhou finally completed his PowerPoint report, he suddenly received a call from Yang Xu.

An excited voice was heard from the other end of the telephone.

“We did it! We did it!”

Lu Zhou heard the exhilarating voice and immediately asked, “Lithium-sulfur battery?”

Yang Xu nodded with excitement and said, “Yes! Your thought process is right, we can use glucose as the precursor and choose the copolymer of polyaniline oxime polypyrrole as the pore-forming agent. We successfully synthesized the surface area to 3022m2/g and created hollow carbon nanospheres with a diameter of only 69nm.”

Yang Xu drank some water and cleared his throat; he couldn’t wait to speak.

“Then, we mixed the hollow carbon spheres with sulfur by chemical deposition and assembled them into the battery mold to perform the battery performance test. The final result was quite satisfactory.

I won’t talk about the rest over the phone, I have sent the relevant experiment data to your email. Look at it!”

“Okay, I will.”

Lu Zhou was excited at how thrilled Yang Xu was, so he hung up the phone and checked his email.

There was an email from Yang Xu in his mailbox.

Lu Zhou downloaded the email attachments and opened the file with the experiment data. He converted it to a PDF format and carefully read it line by line.

This experiment data contained the battery performance test data, images taken with the SEM, and also data graph plots.

As per what Yang Xu said, the performance of this new material was quite good. No wonder Yang Xu was so excited.

Comparing the original hollow carbon nanospheres with the activated carbon nanospheres prepared using potassium hydroxide, the activated hollow carbon spheres performed excellently with a 70% sulfur composite.

This was only at the macroscopic level, the microscopic level was even more interesting.

The sulfur ions embedded in the hollow carbon spheres could escape from the surface pores of the hollow carbon spheres. They could also electrochemically react with the lithium ions moving to the positive electrode in an orderly manner as well as generating Li2S2 and Li2S between the carbon spheres. This prevented the pore blockage from affecting the efficiency of the electrochemical cycle.

On the other hand, because the charged sulfur ions were in limited contact with the lithium ions, the formation of a long-chain compound LiSn was avoided.

Everyone knew that long-chain LiSn molecules were easily soluble in organic solutions, and that was the basis of the shuttle effect. If the formation mechanism of these molecules could be reduced, it would totally prevent the loss of the positive electrode material.

Not just that, even if a small amount of LiSn (where n is greater than 2) compound was formed in the reaction system, due to the surface absorption properties of the hollow carbon sphere, the polysulfide compound would be trapped inside the positive electrode material. This could prevent it from diffusing through the surface of the material and into the electrolyte.

These two layers of protection minimized the effects of the shuttle effect.

Once Lu Zhou finished reading the physical and chemical properties analysis, he looked at the battery testing.

According to the battery experiments done by the Jinling Institute of Computational Materials, the ability to inhibit the diffusion of polysulfide compounds into the electrolyte peaked when the sulfur content was at 73%. Even after 500 battery cycles, the coulomb efficiency remained at a high level.

When the sulfur content was at 75%, other factors such as energy density, volume energy density, etc reached an optimal level.

Yang Xu named the new hollow carbon sphere HCS-2, following the nomenclature of Lu Zhou.

This new material was undoubtedly more applicable than HCS-1!

“Perfect.”

Lu Zhou placed the experiment report on the table and took out his phone. He called Mr. White Sheridan, the general manager of Star Sky Technology. He told Mr. White to immediately start the international patent applications.

Taking into account the broad prospects of this material, Star Sky Technology would separately register patents on a series of aspects such as compounds, production, use, and mixing ratio of sulfur to HCS-2 materials. This allowed them to establish a robust patent defense.

If things went well, Lu Zhou could receive the patent numbers before the end of the month and could begin writing his thesis.

The success of the HCS-2 material was partly due to computational materials methods. This would undoubtedly provide an important example of his theoretical model of the electrochemical interface structure.

Lu Zhou was particularly looking forward to his theory being applied…

…

White was very efficient; he had already submitted all of the documents and passed the patent application.

After getting the patent numbers, Lu Zhou immediately began writing the thesis.

The last paper on HCS-1 was also written by him. He could use the same format and structure for this thesis. He finished writing the thesis within three days.

He chose the Science journal as his submission target.

Lu Zhou submitted the journal and began to prepare for his Max Planck Institute meeting.

However, this submission gave the editorial department at Science a hard time.

Submitting theses in Science was a hobby of many big names. For example, David Shaw was one of them.

And Science welcomed these theses. After all, the big names gave Science a good reputation within the academic community.

However, Professor Lu had submitted three theses within half a year; it was a bit extreme…

The problem wasn’t the HCS-2 material itself. Most mathematics academic editors in the department couldn’t believe that Lu Zhou made such a huge improvement on the HCS-1 material within such a short period of time.

Not to mention the carbon-sulfur composite thesis by Professor Stanley was also on JACS.

Everyone had reason to suspect that Professor Lu might have competed with Professor Stanley on the lithium-sulfur battery project and that Professor Stanley might have published incomplete experiment results.

Things like this had happened in the academic community before.

The Science editorial department decided to hand it over to the reviewer.

The reviewer responsible was Professor Bawendi from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Just like last time, this professor accepted the review request and repeated Lu Zhou’s experiment step by step by paying out of his own pocket.

He was amazed by the results.

Bawendi succeeded again…

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