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[Display omitted] • Amorphous Al 2 O 3 in porous carbon anchored on carbon cloth was first fabricated. • The composite was investigated as a multifunctional interlayer for Li-S batteries. • The Li-S cells with high sulfur-loading exhibited superior cycling stability. • The Li-S cells exhibited excellent rate capability. • The amorphous Al 2 O 3 in porous carbon can effectively suppress the LPS shuttle effect. To realize practical applications of lithium-sulfur batteries, rational strategies have to be applied to overcome obstacles such as the shuttle effect and sluggish reaction kinetics of soluble long-chain lithium polysulfides (LPS). In this work, highly electrocatalytic active amorphous Al 2 O 3 uniformly dispersed in porous carbon (Al 2 O 3 /C) anchored on carbon cloth (CC) was successfully fabricated. The resultant flexible Al 2 O 3 /C@CC was used as an independent interlayer for Li-S batteries, demonstrating strong physical confinement and chemical binding ability for LPS, as well as high catalytic activity for LPS conversion kinetics due to a synergistic effect of 3D conductive network, amorphous nature of Al 2 O 3 /C, porous structure and abundant active sites. The cells with such interlayer exhibit high specific capacity, superior cycling stability and rate capability, 903 mAh/g at 0.2C after 100 cycles and 810 mAh/g at 1.0C after 300 cycles can be achieved, moreover, 741 mAh/g can still be retained at a high rate of up to 5.0C. By contrast, Al-MOF grown on carbon cloth (Al-MOF@CC) exhibits limited performance improvement due to poor electrical conductivity, low structure stability, as well as limited ion diffusion rate and weak Lewis acid-base interactions due to lack of open channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic foams with high strength and light weight are essential for aerospace and deep sea explorations. In this study, high-performance carbon fiber/hollow glass microspheres/epoxy syntactic foams were prepared, and the reinforcing mechanism of carbon fiber is discussed. The syntactic foam with 3 wt% short carbon fiber achieves a uniaxial compressive strength of 141.7 MPa, which is among the highest values reported in the literature. The thermal conductivity of syntactic foam increased by 66.7% with the addition of 3 wt% short carbon fibers, which helped to control the cracking issue caused by the inner temperature surge during the curing process. Further stress characterizations using fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) confirmed that carbon fiber can relieve the evolution of thermal stress and reduce the residual thermal stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]