Lithium-Sulfur Battery

A lithium-sulfur battery is a rechargeable battery that uses metallic lithium as its anode and sulfur as its cathode, rather than the metal-oxide cathodes used in conventional lithium-ion cells. During discharge, lithium ions migrate through the electrolyte to the sulfur cathode, where the sulfur is reduced first to lithium polysulfides and eventually to lithium sulfide, a reaction that reverses during charging; because sulfur is light and lithium has a high electrochemical potential, the battery's theoretical specific energy reaches about 2,600 watt-hours per kilogram, far above lithium-ion, with practical cells demonstrating around 450 watt-hours per kilogram. The technology has not reached wide commercial use because dissolved polysulfides migrate between the electrodes and degrade the cell, limiting cycle life to roughly 110 to 1,000 cycles compared with the thousands of cycles lithium-ion cells achieve. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/