Progress on the Critical Parameters for Lithium–Sulfur Batteries to be Practically Viable

Lithium–sulfur batteries have great potential to satisfy the increasing demand of energy storage systems for portable devices, electric vehicles, and grid storage because of their extremely high specific capacity, cost-effectiveness, and environmental friendliness. In spite of all these merits, the practical utilization of lithium–sulfur batteries is impeded by commonly known challenges, such as low sulfur utilization (<80%), short life (<200 cycles), fast capacity fade, and severe self-discharge effect, which mainly result from the i) low conductivity of the active material, ii) serious polysulfide shuttling, iii) large volume changes, and iv) lithium–metal anode contamination/corrosion. Numerous approaches are reported to effectively mitigate these issues. Indeed, such approaches have shown enhanced lithium–sulfur battery performances. However, many reports overlook the critical parameters, including sulfur loading (<13 mg cm⁻²), sulfur content (<70 wt%), and electrolyte/sulfur ratio (>11 µL mg⁻¹), that significantly affect the analyzed electrochemical characteristics, energy density, and practicality of lithium–sulfur batteries. This review highlights the trends and progress in making cells fulfilling these fabrication parameters and discuss the challenges of the amount of sulfur and electrolyte in fabricating cells with practically necessary parameters and with high electrochemical utilization and efficiency.