Proton-self-doped PANI@CC as the cathode for high-performance aqueous zinc-ion battery

Rong Han; Yusong Pan; Chenjie Yin; Chao Du; Yanlei Xiang; Yuanqing Wang; Hongwu Zhu

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2023.06.208

Proton-self-doped PANI@CC as the cathode for high-performance aqueous zinc-ion battery

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2023 Nov 15;650(Pt A):322-329. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2023.06.208. Epub 2023 Jul 1.

Authors

Rong Han¹, Yusong Pan², Chenjie Yin³, Chao Du¹, Yanlei Xiang¹, Yuanqing Wang¹, Hongwu Zhu¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, Anhui 232001, China.
² School of Materials Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, Anhui 232001, China. Electronic address: yusongpan@163.com.
³ School of Chemical Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, Anhui 232001, China. Electronic address: cjyin@aust.edu.cn.

PMID: 37413866
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2023.06.208

Abstract

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIB) have several advantages such as low cost, large theoretical capacity and good safety. However, the development of polyaniline (PANI) cathode materials has been limited by slow diffusion kinetics. Herein, proton-self-doped polyaniline@carbon cloth (CC) (PANI@CC) was prepared via in-situ polymerization, where polyaniline was deposited on an activated carbon cloth. The PANI@CC cathode exhibits a high specific capacity of 234.3 mA h g^-1 at 0.5 A g^-1, and excellent rate performance, delivering a capacity of 143 mA h g^-1 at 10 A g^-1. Furthermore, the reversible redox conversion during the charge-discharge process was studied using ex-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and ex-situ Raman spectra. The results show that the excellent performance of the PANI@CC battery can be attributed to the formation of a conductive network between the carbon cloth and polyaniline. Also, a mixing mechanism involving insertion/extraction of Zn²⁺/H⁺ and a double-ion process is proposed. PANI@CC electrode is a novel idea for developing high-performance batteries.

Keywords: Aqueous zinc ion battery; Carbon cloth; In-situ polymerization; Mixing mechanism; Polyaniline.