Make it stereoscopic: interfacial design for full-temperature adaptive flexible zinc–air batteries

Abstract

Flexible zinc–air batteries (ZABs) have been scrutinized as a type of promising flexible power source for next-generation electronic devices, but the batteries’ temperature adaptability has been a major hurdle due to their working features. Herein, we report a proof-of-concept study demonstrating that the structure of the air-cathode has an unexpected, significant influence on the temperature adaptability of flexible ZABs. An integrated stereoscopic air-cathode is developed to render enriched reactive triple-phase interfaces at the electrolyte–cathode interface, which enables favorable temperature adaptability in flexible ZABs. Besides, we rationalize that unlike other seal-structured batteries or capacitors, the plausible organohydrogels are not suitable as temperature-adaptive polyelectrolytes for high-performance flexible ZABs, which can instead be achieved by leveraging the interaction between water and terminal groups within polyelectrolyte backbones. As expected, the flexible ZABs developed via combining these two strategies show state-of-the-art electrochemical performances that greatly offset the influence of an extreme temperature change from −30 to 80 °C.