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Abstract
With the flourish of flexible and wearable electronics gadgets, the need for flexible power sources has become essential. The growth of this increasingly diverse range of devices boosted the necessity to develop materials for such flexible power sources such as secondary batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, sensors, dye-sensitized solar cells, etc. In that context, comprehensives studies on flexible conversion and energy storage devices have been released for other technologies such Li-ion standing out the importance of the research done lately in GPEs (gel polymer electrolytes) for energy conversion and storage. However, flexible zinc batteries have not received the attention they deserve within the flexible batteries field, which are destined to be one of the high rank players in the wearable devices future market. This review presents an extensive overview of the most notable or prominent gel polymeric materials, including biobased polymers, and zinc chemistries as well as its practical or functional implementation in flexible wearable devices. The ultimate aim is to highlight zinc-based batteries as power sources to fill a segment of the world flexible batteries future market.
Highlights
Zinc presents a promising alternative as battery material given its relatively high abundance, low toxicity, higher safety parameters, and low potential, making it appropriate for use in energy storage systems [1]
The task ahead is enormous; the work has been constrained to the most important or widespread gel polymer electrolytes focusing ourselves in Zinc-MnO2 and Zinc-air batteries, but we have not disregarded any other representative zinc chemistry or cutting edge work that could provide a valuable perspective to the readers
This detailed discussion is organized from the perspective of the gel polymer electrolyte followed by cathode materials, considering the anode the less crucial component of a zinc-based battery for several reasons; air cathodes are still the performance-limiting electrode of Zn–air batteries [77], the availability of the Zinc makes it a cheap element which are normally in excess within the batteries, extensive research about zinc anodes is available in the literature [78,79,80,81,82,83] and Coulombic efficiency (CE) may be considered high enough, reaching in some cases up to 90% and higher, with little perspective of improvement [84]
Summary
Zinc presents a promising alternative as battery material given its relatively high abundance, low toxicity, higher safety parameters, and low potential, making it appropriate for use in energy storage systems [1]. There are convincing reasons to use zinc as battery material: this metal has a considerable negative standard potential of −0.76 V, it can be produced in high purity, and subsequently can be alloyed to get stable formulations in aqueous electrolytes for long times. It has a low price and around the world there exists a long tradition in zinc recycling. Lithium reserves account only for 17 million Mt [4] and none of the current battery recycling technologies for lithium are perfect and need to be adjusted based on composition of active materials [5]. Sodium and potassium suffer from both high reactivity as Lithium and their production
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