Currently, lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries still suffer from fast capacity decay, poor coulombic efficiency (CE) and short cycling lifespan, which result from the severe shuttle effect issue caused by high solubility and rapid diffusion of lithium polysulfides (LiPSs) in organic electrolytes. Here, yolk-shell zinc oxide (YS-ZnO) spheres are synthesized and for the first time, applied as a host for Li-S batteries to tackle this challenge. The polar ZnO exhibits high chemical anchoring ability toward LiPSs while the unique yolk-shell structure not only provides an additional physical barrier to LiPSs but also enables much more uniform sulfur distribution, thus significantly suppressing LiPSs shuttling effect meanwhile promoting sulfur conversion reactions. As a result, the YS-ZnO enables the Li-S battery to display an initial specific capacity of 1355 mAh g⁻¹ and an outstanding capacity retention capability (~89.44% retention rate) even after 500 cycles with the average CE of ~99.46% at the current of 0.5 C. By contrast, the capacity of conventional-ZnO-nanoparticles based battery severely decays to 472 mAh g⁻¹ after cycling for 500 times. More impressively, the S/YS-ZnO based Li-S battery can maintain a low decay rate of 0.040% every cycle and high average CE of 98.82% over 1000 cycles at 3 C.

当前，锂-硫（Li-S）电池仍遭受快速容量衰减，库伦效率（CE）和循环寿命短的问题，这是由于多硫化锂（LiPSs）的高溶解度和快速扩散引起的严重的穿梭效应问题造成的在有机电解质中。在这里，合成了卵黄壳氧化锌（YS-ZnO）球，并首次将其用作Li-S电池的基质以应对这一挑战。极性ZnO对LiPS具有高化学锚定能力，而独特的卵黄壳结构不仅为LiPS提供了额外的物理屏障，而且使硫分布更加均匀，从而显着抑制了LiPS的穿梭效应，同时促进了硫转化反应。结果是，^-1和出色的容量保持能力（〜89.44％的保持率），即使经过500次循环，在0.5 C的电流下的平均CE约为〜99.46％。相比之下，基于ZnO纳米粒子的传统电池的容量严重降低至循环500次后为472 mAh g ^-1。更令人印象深刻的是，基于S / YS-ZnO的Li-S电池在3 C的1000个循环中可以保持每个周期0.040％的低衰减率和98.82％的高平均CE。