Designing Strong Interface of Cubic‐like Sn–Co–S@carbon with SnO₂ as Catalyst for Enhanced Li/Na‐Ion Storage Abilities

Abstract As potential candidates, metal sulfides display strong storage abilities but suffer from serious volume swelling and polysulfide shuttling. Especially rich‐sulfur materials, inferior reversible conversion reactions (from MS₂ to MS with S) can bring about major formation of sulfur. Herein, cubic‐like Sn–Co–S materials with SnO₂ as catalyst are designed with various dimensional carbon. The as‐resulted samples display uniform distributed particle size (≈5 µm), while cross‐linked Sn–Co–S@carbon is successfully formed due to its rich surficial groups. Significantly, the formation of chemical bonds about Sn/Co–S–C is noted, facilitating ions/e‐transfering and architecture enhancing. Meanwhile, owing to the endothermic effect of carbon, SnO₂ finally resulted, effectively limiting the so‐called “shuttling effect” of polysulfide. Utilized as sodium‐ion anodes, the optimized samples can deliver a capacity of 490 mAh g⁻¹ at 0.5 A g⁻¹ and ≈400 mAh g⁻¹ above at 5.0 A g⁻¹. Assisted by the detailed kinetic analysis, it can be confirmed that the improvements of surface‐controlling behaviors mainly come from the interfacial chemical bonds and strong‐polar metal‐oxides bonds. This work is expected to illustrate the roles of interfacial design and metal oxide catalysts for advanced energy storage materials.