Two‐Step Activated Carbon Cloth with Oxygen‐Rich Functional Groups as a High‐Performance Additive‐Free Air Electrode for Flexible Zinc–Air Batteries

By K. Kordek, Lixue Jiang, Kaicai Fan, Zhengju Zhu, Li Xu, M. Al‐Mamun, Yuhai Dou, Shan Chen, Porun Liu, H. Yin and 2 more. Advanced Energy Materials, 2018

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A flexible air electrode (FAE) with both high oxygen electrocatalytic activity and excellent flexibility is the key to the performance of various flexible devices, such as Zn–air batteries. A facile two‐step method, mild acid oxidation followed by air calcination that directly activates commercial carbon cloth (CC) to generate uniform nanoporous and super hydrophilic surface structures with optimized oxygen‐rich functional groups and an enhanced surface area, is presented here. Impressively, this two‐step activated CC (CC‐AC) exhibits superior oxygen electrocatalytic activity and durability, outperforming the oxygen‐doped carbon materials reported to date. Especially, CC‐AC delivers an oxygen evolution reaction (OER) overpotential of 360 mV at 10 mA cm−2 in 1 m KOH, which is among the best performances of metal‐free OER electrocatalysts. The practical application of CC‐AC is presented via its use as an FAE in a flexible rechargeable Zn–air battery. The bendable battery achieves a high open circuit voltage of 1.37 V, a remarkable peak power density of 52.3 mW cm−3 at 77.5 mA cm−3, good cycling performance with a small charge–discharge voltage gap of 0.98 V and high flexibility. This study provides a new approach to the design and construction of high‐performance self‐supported metal‐free electrodes.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9113ad92614c0762553decc6bbaafa48a5dc6421

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. A. Yu
2. Ya-Ping Deng
3. Zhongwei Chen
4. Yi Jiang

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. A. Yu
2. Zhongwei Chen

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. A. Yu
2. Zhongwei Chen

Citations in the corpus

• Recent Progress on Flexible Zn-Air Batteries (2021, background): “cloth.[114] This activated carbon cloth provided a hydrophilic surface that could facilitate the wettability of electrolyte.”