On 30 March 2026, Dan Wang and Ranbo Yu's teams and their collaborators published a research article entitled “Spatially coupled adsorption and catalysis for sustainable lithium-sulfur batteries” in Nature Sustainability (Impact Factor: 27.1, CAS Q1, TOP journal). According to the source manuscript, Ruyi Bi is the first author, and Dan Wang, Ranbo Yu, Jiangyan Wang, Liang Li, and Zheng Liang serve as corresponding authors.

Lithium-sulfur batteries are widely regarded as a promising next-generation energy-storage technology because of their ultrahigh theoretical energy density and the abundance of low-cost sulfur. In practice, however, their high-energy advantage is often compromised by the polysulfide shuttle effect, sluggish sulfur redox kinetics, and the large inactive mass introduced by conventional host materials and catalysts.

Article webpage

In this work, the team developed an sp-nitrogen-doped graphdiyne hollow multishelled structure (sp-N GDY HoMS) that spatially couples adsorption sites and catalytic sites within one host. The multishelled hollow architecture offers efficient confinement, hierarchical transport pathways, and structural accommodation for volume change, while the sp-N sites regulate local electronic structure and facilitate the adsorption and conversion of lithium polysulfides.

The system achieved an ultrahigh sulfur loading of 93.9%, a close-to-theoretical capacity of 1462 mAh g_(S+host)⁻¹, and an energy density of 1384.5 Wh kg_(S+host)⁻¹ at 10C over 600 cycles. Pouch cells further reached an energy density of about 457 Wh kg⁻¹. In situ Raman, FTIR, UV-vis, and EIS measurements, together with theoretical calculations, showed that the favorable orbital interaction associated with sp-N sites promotes charge redistribution, accelerates polysulfide conversion, and lowers the reaction barrier of the key Li₂S₄-to-Li₂S₂ step. The work provides a scalable blueprint for high-performance and resource-efficient battery chemistries.

Representative figure: pouch-cell level validation

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 52025028 to L.L., 52372170 to R.Y., 92572205 to D.W., 52261160573 and 52301296 to J. Wang), the National Key R&D Program (grant nos. 2024YFA1509400 and 2022YFA1204500 to D.W., 2022YFA1504101 to J. Wang, 2021YFB2400300 to Z.L.), Shenzhen University 2035 Program for Excellent Research (grant no. 2024B005 to R.Y. and D.W.), the Zhongke-Yuneng Joint R&D Center Program (grant no. ZKYN2022008 to D.W.), Hebei Provincial Department of Science and Technology - Basic Research Cooperation Project of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region (grant no. B2024204027 to R.Y.), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (grant no. Z230019 to J. Wang) and the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) Project for Frontier Basic Research grant no. QYJC-2022-008 to J.