New Mechanism for Ultra-Fast Charging Aqueous Zinc-Ion Batteries

TapTechNews reported on June 17th that TapTechNews learned from the official website of Wuhan University of Technology that the university team proposed a new mechanism for realizing ultra-fast charging batteries based on zinc-ion-mediated catalytic action, and developed an ultra-high power, intrinsically safe aqueous zinc-ion battery, providing a new theoretical basis and technical path for the development and application of the next-generation ultra-fast charging battery. The results have been published in Nature Catalysis.

Paper address: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-024-01169-6

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries are a type of battery with water as the electrolyte, which has the advantages of safety, fast charging, low cost, and environment-friendly, and is a new energy storage technology with application prospects.

The reaction rate of the traditional ion shuttle model is limited by the limit of Fick's second law and it is difficult to achieve a breakthrough in rate performance.

The university team proposed the ion-mediated catalytic storage theory and found that regulating the adsorption of cations in the electrode material and electrolyte to the water in the solvent sheath layer will significantly affect the reaction rate and products of water splitting, far exceeding the reaction rate of traditional batteries, reasonably explaining the abnormal fast charging performance of aqueous zinc-ion batteries and providing a new mechanism different from the traditional ion shuttle model.

The team achieved the ultra-fast charging and ultra-high rate performance predicted by the catalytic model by confining vanadium nitride nanoclusters in three-dimensional porous graphene aerogel - the specific capacity of the battery reached 577.1 mAh/g at a high current density of 300 A/g.