TY - JOUR
T1 - A hierarchical porous tin host for dendrite-free, highly reversible zinc anodes
AU - Jian, Qinping
AU - Guo, Zixiao
AU - Zhang, Leicheng
AU - Wu, Maochun
AU - Zhao, Tianshou
N1 - Funding Information:
The work described in this paper was supported by the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. T23-601/17-R ) and Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2021A1515011815 ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2021/12/1
Y1 - 2021/12/1
N2 - Metallic zinc (Zn), featuring high specific capacity, low redox potential, and low cost, is a promising anode material for next-generation rechargeable aqueous batteries. However, Zn anodes suffer from the dendrite formation and side reactions during the plating/stripping process, which severely hinder their practical applications. To simultaneously address these issues, we create a hierarchical porous framework by electroless plating a conformal nanoporous tin (Sn) layer on a copper (Cu) mesh as a host (NSH) for the Zn anode. Both experimental and numerical results reveal that the newly developed NSH offers abundant Zn nucleation sites, homogenizes both the ion flux and electric field at the electrode surface, and suppresses side reactions with the high hydrogen evolution reaction overpotential of Sn, thus leading to dendrite-free Zn deposition and a highly reversible plating/stripping process. As a result, the asymmetric Zn||NSH cell achieves a coulombic efficiency (CE) of 99.0% for over 200 cycles at 2 mA cm−2. The cell with the pristine Cu mesh host (PCH), in comparison, exhibits a CE of 97.7% and suffers from short-circuits after 50 cycles. Moreover, the Zn@NSH anode enables the Zn-MnO2 full cell to deliver a high capacity of 164 mAh g−1 and maintain a retention rate of 86.2% after 1200 cycles at 1 A g−1. By contrast, the capacity of the cell with the Zn@PCH anode decays to 55.2 mAh g−1 after 800 cycles, corresponding to a retention rate of 38.1%. This work opens a new avenue to develop advanced three-dimensional Zn metal anodes for high-performance rechargeable aqueous batteries.
AB - Metallic zinc (Zn), featuring high specific capacity, low redox potential, and low cost, is a promising anode material for next-generation rechargeable aqueous batteries. However, Zn anodes suffer from the dendrite formation and side reactions during the plating/stripping process, which severely hinder their practical applications. To simultaneously address these issues, we create a hierarchical porous framework by electroless plating a conformal nanoporous tin (Sn) layer on a copper (Cu) mesh as a host (NSH) for the Zn anode. Both experimental and numerical results reveal that the newly developed NSH offers abundant Zn nucleation sites, homogenizes both the ion flux and electric field at the electrode surface, and suppresses side reactions with the high hydrogen evolution reaction overpotential of Sn, thus leading to dendrite-free Zn deposition and a highly reversible plating/stripping process. As a result, the asymmetric Zn||NSH cell achieves a coulombic efficiency (CE) of 99.0% for over 200 cycles at 2 mA cm−2. The cell with the pristine Cu mesh host (PCH), in comparison, exhibits a CE of 97.7% and suffers from short-circuits after 50 cycles. Moreover, the Zn@NSH anode enables the Zn-MnO2 full cell to deliver a high capacity of 164 mAh g−1 and maintain a retention rate of 86.2% after 1200 cycles at 1 A g−1. By contrast, the capacity of the cell with the Zn@PCH anode decays to 55.2 mAh g−1 after 800 cycles, corresponding to a retention rate of 38.1%. This work opens a new avenue to develop advanced three-dimensional Zn metal anodes for high-performance rechargeable aqueous batteries.
KW - Aqueous battery
KW - Dendrite-free
KW - Energy storage
KW - Hierarchical porous host
KW - Zinc metal anode
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107748846&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cej.2021.130643
DO - 10.1016/j.cej.2021.130643
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85107748846
SN - 1385-8947
VL - 425
JO - Chemical Engineering Journal
JF - Chemical Engineering Journal
M1 - 130643
ER -