In situ coupling of Ag nanoparticles with high-entropy oxides as highly stable bifunctional catalysts for wearable Zn-Ag/Zn-air hybrid batteries

Yanyi Zhang; Juan Lyu; Yi-Lu Zhao; Kailong Hu; Zuhuang Chen; Xi Lin; Guoqiang Xie; Xingjun Liu; Hua-Jun Qiu

doi:10.1039/d1nr03539h

In situ coupling of Ag nanoparticles with high-entropy oxides as highly stable bifunctional catalysts for wearable Zn-Ag/Zn-air hybrid batteries

Nanoscale. 2021 Oct 8;13(38):16164-16171. doi: 10.1039/d1nr03539h.

Authors

Yanyi Zhang¹, Juan Lyu², Yi-Lu Zhao¹, Kailong Hu¹, Zuhuang Chen¹, Xi Lin¹, Guoqiang Xie¹, Xingjun Liu^{1

3}, Hua-Jun Qiu^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute of Blockchain Research and Development, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China. qiuhuajun@hit.edu.cn.
² School of Physics Science and Technology, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010021, China.
³ Shenzhen R&D Center for Al-based Hydrogen Hydrolysis Materials, Shenzhen, 518055, China.

PMID: 34543369
DOI: 10.1039/d1nr03539h

Abstract

With the combination of the advantages of both Zn-Ag and Zn-air batteries, hybrid Zn-Ag/Zn-air batteries nevertheless suffer greatly from structural instability and activity degradation of the catalysts at the air electrodes. Herein, we introduce a scalable chemical dealloying procedure to synthesize mutually interacting and stable bifunctional catalysts, consisting of imbedded Ag nanoparticles for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and quantitatively designed multicomponent high-entropy oxides (HEOs) for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The ORR performance and the Zn-Ag battery capacity can be precisely controlled by the content of Ag nanoparticles. Impressively, with a significantly low Ag content (∼9.13 wt%) in the bifunctional (AlNiCoFeCr)₃O₄/Ag, our hybrid Zn-Ag/Zn-air batteries using such catalysts are able to be continuously charged/discharged for more than 450 h and deliver a high energy density of 810 W h kg^-1. We expect that these stabilized noble metals in HEO nanocomposites may work as multifunctional electrocatalysts in many other energy conversion devices.