Nonionic Surfactant-Assisted In Situ Generation of Stable Passivation Protective Layer for Highly Stable Aqueous Zn Metal Anodes

Yuanjun Zhang; Xiaoyang Zheng; Kuan Wu; Ying Zhang; Gang Xu; Minghong Wu; Hua-Kun Liu; Shi-Xue Dou; Chao Wu

doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c03114

Nonionic Surfactant-Assisted In Situ Generation of Stable Passivation Protective Layer for Highly Stable Aqueous Zn Metal Anodes

Nano Lett. 2022 Nov 9;22(21):8574-8583. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c03114. Epub 2022 Oct 24.

Authors

Yuanjun Zhang^{1

2}, Xiaoyang Zheng^{3

4}, Kuan Wu¹, Ying Zhang¹, Gang Xu⁵, Minghong Wu⁵, Hua-Kun Liu^{6

7}, Shi-Xue Dou^{6

7}, Chao Wu^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
² School of Intelligent Manufacturing, Huzhou College, Huzhou 313000, China.
³ Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba 305-8573, Japan.
⁴ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang 621010, China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Organic Compound Pollution Control Engineering (MOE), Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
⁶ Institute for Superconducting & Electronic Materials, Australian Institute of Innovative Materials, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales 2522, Australia.
⁷ Institute of Energy Materials Science (IEMS), University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, 516 Jungong Road, Shanghai 200093, China.

PMID: 36279311
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c03114

Abstract

A highly stable interface for aqueous rechargeable Zn batteries is of importance to inhibit the growth of Zn dendrites and suppress the side reactions. In this work, we have developed a stable honeycomb-like ZnO passivation protective layer on the Zn surface, which is in situ generated with the assistance of a nonionic surfactant additive (polyethylene glycol tert-octylphenyl ether, denoted as PEGTE). The ZnO passivation layer can facilitate the uniform distribution of the electric field, guiding the uniform deposition of Zn²⁺ and inhibit the generation of dendrites. As a result, the symmetric cell using the electrolyte with PEGTE shows an excellent performance at high areal capacity, reflected by stable cycling for over 2400 h at 5 mAh/cm² and 1300 h at 10 mAh/cm². The full cell paired with V₂O₅ demonstrates a long lifespan for more than 600 cycles at a low negative/positive capacity ratio.

Keywords: Aqueous Zn-ion battery; High areal capacity; Nonionic surfactant; Protection layer; Zn metal anodes.