A Review on Engineering Transition Metal Compound Catalysts to Accelerate the Redox Kinetics of Sulfur Cathodes for Lithium–Sulfur Batteries

Engineering transition metal compounds(TMCs)catalysts with excellent adsorption-catalytic ability has been one of the most effec-tive strategies to accelerate the redox kinetics of sulfur cathodes.Herein,this review focuses on engineering TMCs catalysts by cation doping/anion doping/dual doping,bimetallic/bi-anionic TMCs,and TMCs-based heterostructure composites.It is obvious that introducing cations/anions to TMCs or constructing heterostructure can boost adsorption-catalytic capacity by regulating the electronic structure including energy band,d/p-band center,electron filling,and valence state.Moreover,the elec-tronic structure of doped/dual-ionic TMCs are adjusted by inducing ions with different electronegativity,electron filling,and ion radius,resulting in electron redistribution,bonds reconstruction,induced vacancies due to the electronic interaction and changed crystal structure such as lat-tice spacing and lattice distortion.Different from the aforementioned two strategies,heterostructures are constructed by two types of TMCs with different Fermi energy levels,which causes built-in electric field and electrons transfer through the interface,and induces electron redistribution and arranged local atoms to regulate the electronic structure.Additionally,the lacking studies of the three strategies to comprehensively regulate electronic structure for improving catalytic performance are pointed out.It is believed that this review can guide the design of advanced TMCs catalysts for boosting redox of lithium sulfur batteries.

Near real-time modeling of global ionospheric vertical total electron content using hourly IGS data

The International GNSS Service(IGS) has been providing reliable Global Ionospheric Maps(GIMs) since 1998. The Ionosphere Associate Analysis Centers(IAACs) model the global ionospheric Total Electron Content(TEC) and generate the daily GIM products within the context of the IGS. However, the rapid and final daily GIM products have a latency of at least one day and one week or so, respectively. This limits the value of GIM products in real-time GNSS applications.We propose and develop an approach for near real-time modeling of global ionospheric TEC by using the hourly IGS data. We perform an experiment in a real operating environment to generate near real-time GIM(named BUHG) products for more than two years. Final daily GIM products,Precise Point Positioning(PPP) based VTEC resources, and JASON-3 Vertical TEC(VTEC) measurements are collected for testing the performance of BUHG. The results show that the performance of BUHG is very close to that of the daily GIM products. Also, there is good agreement between BUHG and PPP-derived VTEC as well as with JASON-3 VTEC. It is possible that BUHG would be further improved with an increase in available hourly GNSS data.