Porous carbon materials for Li-S batteries based on resorcinol-formaldehyde resin with inverse opal structure

This study reports on a novel approach to fabrication of carbon-sulfur composite material and demonstrates its application as cathode for Li-S batteries. Firstly, highly porous carbon material has been prepared by exploiting PMMA colloidal crystal arrays as sacrificial template and subsequently mixing with elemental sulfur at 155 °C. The resulting carbon-sulfur composite cathode material possess very high intrinsic surface area, conductivity and has been found to demonstrate as high as 1600 mAh g−1 capacity in 1st discharge cycle and about 300-400 mAh g−1 in 50th discharge cycle.