Aqueous zinc batteries, that demonstrate high safety and low cost, are considered promising candidates for large‐scale energy storage. However, Zn anodes suffer from rapid performance deterioration due to the severe Zn dendrite growth and side reactions. Herein, with a low‐cost ammonium acetate (NH4OAc) additive, a self‐regulated Zn/electrolyte interface is built to address these problems. The NH4+ induces a dynamic electrostatic shielding layer around the abrupt Zn protuberance to make the Zn deposition uniform, and the OAc− acts as an interfacial pH buffer to suppress the proton‐induced side reactions and the precipitation of insoluble by‐products. As a result, in the electrolyte with the NH4OAc additive, Zn anodes exhibit a long cycling stability of 3500 h at 1 mA cm−2, an impressive cumulative areal capacity of 5000 mAh cm−2 at 10 mA cm−2, and a high Coulombic efficiency of ≈99.7%. A prototype full cell coupled with a NH4V4O10 cathode performs much better in terms of capacity retention than the additive‐free case. The findings pave the way for developing practical Zn batteries.
In aqueous zinc (Zn) batteries, the Zn anode suffers from severe corrosion reactions and consequent dendrite growth troubles that cause fast performance decay. Herein, we uncover the corrosion mechanism and confirm that the dissolved oxygen (DO) other than the reputed proton is a principal origin of Zn corrosion and by-product precipitates, especially during the initial battery resting period. In a break from common physical deoxygenation methods, we propose a chemical selfdeoxygenation strategy to tackle the DO-induced hazards. As a proof of concept, sodium anthraquinone-2sulfonate (AQS) is introduced to aqueous electrolytes as a self-deoxidizing additive. As a result, the Zn anode sustains a long-term cycling of 2500 h at 0.5 mA cm À 2 and over 1100 h at 5 mA cm À 2 together with a high Coulombic efficiency up to 99.6 %. The full cells also show a high capacity retention of 92 % after 500 cycles. Our findings provide a renewed understanding of Zn corrosion in aqueous electrolytes and also a practical solution towards industrializing aqueous Zn batteries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.