Ultra-stable and highly reversible aqueous zinc metal anodes with high preferred orientation deposition achieved by a polyanionic hydrogel electrolyte

By Jianlong Cong, Xiu Shen, Zhipeng Wen, Xin Wang, Longqing Peng, Jing Zeng, Jinbao Zhao. 2021

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Although aqueous zinc metal batteries (AZMBs) have attractive advantages such as high safety, low cost and eco-friendliness, severe dendrites formation and side reactions of zinc metal anodes cause a serious challenge for commercial applications. Herein, a polyanionic hydrogel electrolyte, poly 2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propane sulfonate zinc (PAMPSZn) is firstly designed and synthesized by ion exchange and free-radical polymerization. The PAMPSZn hydrogel electrolyte owns fixed polyanionic chain and restricted Zn2+ transport channels, which can effectively alleviate the side reactions and prevent the formation of Zn dendrites simultaneously. Consequently, the anode-friendly electrolyte not only enables ultra-stable Zn plating/stripping over 4500 h at 1.0 mA cm−2, but also achieves high preferred orientation deposition during the procedure of repeated plating/stripping. It delivers high reversibility with high initial coulombic efficiency (87.5%) and average coulombic efficiency (99.3%) in Zn/Cu cells at 0.5 mA cm−2. Zn/V2O5 cells with the developed electrolyte also possess outstanding cycle stability with capacity retention of 80.2% after 400 cycles at 0.5 A g−1. The PAMPSZn hydrogel electrolyte with unique fixed polyanionic chain and restricted Zn2+ transport channels demonstrates an effective strategy to solve both dendrites formation and side reactions in AZMBs, providing a new opportunity for high performance AZMBs.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8036baa564a8c3dceb77b4fd1f06f022e1bec5b9