On the afternoon of December 19, the Zhejiang Chemical Society held the “2020 Zhejiang Chemical Society Innovation" awarding ceremony at Santai Villa, Hangzhou City. Zhou Suya, a year-three postgraduate student, was shortlisted and won the second prize of "Zhejiang Chemical Society Innovation Award" with her paper titled "Dual-Regulation Strategy to Improve Anchoring and Conversion of Polysulfides in Lithium-Sulfur Batteries."

"Zhejiang Chemical Society Innovation Award" was set in 2014 to encourage young students to actively carry out innovative research and cultivate high-level innovative talents in the field of chemistry. The award is evaluated once a year to commend students from Zhejiang colleges and universities who have made important scientific and technological achievements in chemistry and other related fields. In 2020, a total of 21 high-level academic papers were selected, including 17 papers from Zhejiang University. The numbers for Zhejiang Normal University, Zhejiang Sci-tech University and Wenzhou University were 2, 1 and 1.

Zhou Suya, under the supervision of Professor Yang Zhi, is mainly engaged in the research of lithium-sulfur battery cathodes. She won the first-class scholarship in the 2018 and 2019 academic years, and the national scholarship for graduate students in 2020. Her research results were published on ACS Nano (IF=14.588) during her postgraduate study, and 3 invention patents were obatined. 

Introduction to the award-winning achievements:

During the sulfur conversion process in a lithium-sulfur battery, a series of multiple reactions and complex solid-liquid-solid heterogeneous conversion are required. Therefore, the author proposes a “dual-control conversion model”, which uses artificial mimic enzymes iron phthalocyanine (FePc) and octafluoronaphthalene (OFN) to selectively mediate the conversion of long-chain polysulfides (S8→Li2S4) and short-chain polysulfides conversion (Li2S4→Li2S). A series of in-situ spectroscopy, XPS and DFT are used to study the internal sulfur conversion mechanism of lithium-sulfur batteries. The results show that FePc can effectively anchor and shear long-chain polysulfides through the coordination of Fe∙∙∙S; while OFN promotes the lithium bond with polysulfides and accelerates the Li2S Liquid-solid nucleation and growth kinetics. The dual control system promotes the solid-liquid-solid sulfur conversion reaction to proceed smoothly, and significantly improves the electrochemical performance of the battery.

Link to the Paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03403