Copper Hexacyanoferrate Solid-State Electrolyte Protection Layer on Zn Metal Anode for High-Performance Aqueous Zinc-Ion Batteries.

Abstract

Zinc (Zn) metal possesses broad prospects as an anode for aqueous zinc-ion batteries (AZIBs) due to its considerable theoretical capacity of 820mAhg-1 . However, the Zn anode suffers from dendrite growth and side reactions during Zn stripping/plating. Herein, a Prussian blue analog of copper hexacyanoferrate (CuHCF) with a 3D open structure and rich polar groups (CN) is coated on Zn foil as a solid-state electrolyte (SSE) protection layer to protect the Zn anode. The CuHCF protection layer possesses low activation energy of 26.49kJ mol-1 , the high ionic conductivity of 7.6mScm-1 , and a large Zn2+ transference number of 0.74. Hence, the Zn@CuHCF||Zn@CuHCF symmetric cell delivers high cycling stability over 1800h at 5mAcm-2 , an excellent depth of discharge of 51.3%, and the accumulative discharge capacity over 3000mAhcm-2 . In addition, the Zn//Ti@CuHCF asymmetric cell achieves the coulombic efficiency (CE)of 99.87% after 2000 cycles. More importantly, the Zn@CuHCF//V2 O5 full cell presents outstanding capacity retention of 87.6% at 10Ag-1 after 3000 cycles. This workdevelops a type of material to form an artificial protection layer for high-performance AZIBs.