The research and development of advanced energy-storage systems must meet a large number of requirements, including high energy density, natural abundance of the raw material, low cost and environmental friendliness, and particularly reasonable safety. As the demands of high-performance batteries are continuously increasing, with large-scale energy storage systems and electric mobility equipment, lithium-sulfur batteries have become an attractive candidate for the new generation of high-performance batteries due to their high theoretical capacity (1675 mA h g) and energy density (2600 Wh kg). However, rapid capacity attenuation with poor cycle and rate performances make the batteries far from ideal with respect to real commercial applications. Outstanding breakthroughs and achievements have been made to alleviate these problems in the past ten years. This paper presents an overview of recent advances in lithium-sulfur battery research. We cover the research and development to date on various components of lithium-sulfur batteries, including cathodes, binders, separators, electrolytes, anodes, collectors, and some novel cell configurations. The current trends in materials selection for batteries are reviewed and various choices of cathode, binder, electrolyte, separator, anode, and collector materials are discussed. The current challenges associated with the use of batteries and their materials selection are listed and future perspectives for this class of battery are also discussed.

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Conventional three-dimensional (3D) thermal conductors or heat sinks are normally bulky solids with high density, which is cumbersome and not portable to satisfy current demands for soft and flexible electronic devices. To address this issue, here, a lightweight, superelastic yet thermally conductive boron nitride (BN) nanocomposite aerogel is designed by a facile freeze-drying method. The attained aerogel constituting of tailored interconnected binary inorganic–organic network structure exhibits low bulk density (6.5 mg cm–3) and outstanding mechanical performances for compression, clotting, and stretching. Meanwhile, the aerogel has promising thermal stability and high thermal conductivity over wide temperature ranges (30–300 °C), validating the application even in extremely hot environments. Moreover, the aerogel can serve as a lightweight and elastic heat conductor for the enhancement of thermal energy harvest. Interestingly, during alternate strain loading/unloading under heating, the superelasticity and the anisotropy of thermal conductive transduction make the aerogel enable the elastic thermal energy capture and dynamic regulation. Therefore, our findings provide a potential use for the thermally conductive aerogel in future green energy applications.

Recently, thermally regulating textiles have attracted wide interest owing to their ability to realize personal cooling and provide thermal comfort. However, most of the thermally conductive textiles cannot afford higher temperatures (>200 °C), which restricts their further applications in aviation, fire extinguishing or military requiring high temperature heat spreaders. Here, we report a high temperature thermally conductive nanocomposite textile consisting of amino functional boron nitride (FBN) nanosheets and polyimide (PI) nanofibers. Notably, the textile is "green" electrospun from aqueous solution without any toxic organic solvents, which is facile, economical and environmently friendly. Moreover, both FBN and the precursor of PI are modified to be water soluble and exhibit good compatibility in the spinning solution even under high concentrations. The "green" method obtained FBN-PI textile shows high thermal conductivity (13.1 W m-1 K-1) at a high temperature (300 °C), filling in the gap of thermally conductive polymer nanocomposite fibers for high temperature thermal regulation. Furthermore, it also provides efficient cooling capability as a thermal spreader. The good performance is ascribed to the weaving of the aligned FBN filament in a thermally stable PI fiber, which constructs an effective thermally conductive network. In addition, the nanocomposite textile is light weight, soft and hydrophobic, which is promising for electronic packaging or space suits for special high temperature thermal management.

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