Abstract: With the development of electric vehicles and electronic equipments, lithium-sulfur battery as a potential high-energy chemical power becomes attractive because of its high theoretical specific capacity of 1675 mA·h/g and high theoretical energy density of 2600 W·h/kg. However, the development of lithium-sulfur batteries inevitably has some challenges, including the lower ion and electronic conductivity of sulfur, poor cycle properties, the generated lithium polysulfide can be easily dissolved in organic electrolyte, which become a big barrier for the research and development of lithium-sulfur batteries. In this paper, research progress reported on cathode materials of lithium-sulfur batteries in recent years, the current status, problems and challenges of cathode materials of lithium-sulfur batteries are summarized. Lithium-sulfur batteries can not be in large-scale applications because its development bottleneck is hard to break out. Sulfur electrode material with low conductivity and poor cycle performance, may be improved by carbon coating and/or doping. However, due to the problems of cost and technology, the cathode materials for lithium-sulfur batteries are still in the experimental stage. Therefore, to explore a suitable way for industrial production of improved sulfur based cathode by carbon coating and/or doping technology is the focus of the future work.

Key words: lithium-sulfur batteries, cathode material, composite