Enhancing Aqueous Zinc Metal Anode Reversibility with the Nucleation Sites Given by Oxidized Black Phosphoruspresentation

Abstract

Electric vehicles and renewable energy have gain lots of interests as a trial to protect environment and to prepare the depletion of fossil fuels. However, currently widely used lithium-ion batteries have disadvantages such as safety issue due to the fire hazard from organic electrolytes and non-uniform distribution of lithium reserves. Accordingly, aqueous zinc ion battery is attracting attention as an alternative because of the use of zinc, which has about 17 times more reserves than lithium, and the use of aqueous electrolyte, which has a low risk of fire. To achieve the high-performance aqueous zinc ion battery, zinc metal has been studied a lot due to its high theoretical capacity (820 mA/g). However, there are several huddles to use the zinc metal as an anode. Low reversibility due to the dendrite formation, exhaustion of electrolyte from the hydrogen evolution reaction, and low energy efficiency coming from high overpotential during charge and discharge steps are them. In this study, we tried to overcome these shortcomings by using black phosphorus. Black phosphorus with a layered structure can make phosphorene, a two-dimensional structure like graphene, through exfoliation. Such phosphorene has the advantage of being able to increase the effect of functionalization because the surface occupies a large proportion of the total. Specifically, after oxidizing exfoliated black phosphorus, we could chemically attach it to the zinc surface, a water-stable two-dimensional coating layer was formed. It could drive a uniform and facile deposit of zinc. Computational and experimental methods were used to understand this role of oxidized black phosphorus.