Avoiding short circuits from zinc metal dendrites in anode by backside-plating configuration

Shougo Higashi; Seok Woo Lee; Jang Soo Lee; Kensuke Takechi; Yi Cui

doi:10.1038/ncomms11801

Avoiding short circuits from zinc metal dendrites in anode by backside-plating configuration

Nat Commun. 2016 Jun 6:7:11801. doi: 10.1038/ncomms11801.

Authors

Shougo Higashi^{1

2}, Seok Woo Lee^{1

3}, Jang Soo Lee¹, Kensuke Takechi², Yi Cui^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, 476 Lomita Mall, McCullough Building 343, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
² Smart Design of Materials and Process Research-Domain, Toyota Central R&D Laboratories, Inc., 41-1 Nagakute, Aichi 480-1192, Japan.
³ School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
⁴ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.

Abstract

Portable power sources and grid-scale storage both require batteries combining high energy density and low cost. Zinc metal battery systems are attractive due to the low cost of zinc and its high charge-storage capacity. However, under repeated plating and stripping, zinc metal anodes undergo a well-known problem, zinc dendrite formation, causing internal shorting. Here we show a backside-plating configuration that enables long-term cycling of zinc metal batteries without shorting. We demonstrate 800 stable cycles of nickel-zinc batteries with good power rate (20 mA cm(-2), 20 C rate for our anodes). Such a backside-plating method can be applied to not only zinc metal systems but also other metal-based electrodes suffering from internal short circuits.