A facile and Eco-Efficient Additive Strategy Enables High-performance Aqueous Zinc-ion Batteries

Abstract

High-performance aqueous zinc-ion battery as one of the most promising battery systems has attracted much attentions in the development of next-generation advanced energy storage systems due to the environmental-friendliness, low cost and high safety. However, the development of AZIBs have been plagued by the inherent issues, such as zinc dendrites growth, irreversible dissolution of manganese-based cathode materials, hydrogen precipitation reaction, and other side reactions. In this work, to address these issues, we developed a facile and eco-efficient strategy that adopted an optimized electrolyte additive of Al2(SO4)3 in the ZnSO4-based electrolytes for AZIBs. The electrochemical, spectroscopic, and microscopic characterization results demonstrated that the optimized aluminum sulfate additives can inhibit the Zn dendrite formation, reduce the generation of dead manganese and stabilize the crystalline structure of manganese-based cathode. The Zn||MnO2 full cell exhibits a high discharge plateau of ~1.65 V and excellent cycling stability with a high-capacity retention of 78% even after 1200 cycles at 1C with a high active material loading (~8.0 mg cm-2). This facile and eco-efficient strategy provides a promising and high-efficient strategy to design high-performance AZIBs for energy storage systems.