B-DECENT: Breakthrough Anode-less Rechargeable Aqueous Zinc-ion Batteries

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In the era of carbon neutrality and growing energy demands, clean energy technologies are immensely important. Considering the uncertainty and intermittency of solar and wind power, state-of-the-art electrochemical energy storage (EES) technologies are required to facilitate supply on demand. However, current EES devices rely heavily on Li-ion batteries, which have inherent performance, safety, availability, and cost limitations.Rechargeable aqueous Zn-ion batteries (RAZIBs) have remarkable proven potential as disruptive technology for next-generation EES devices as they promise much lower costs, abundant supply of raw materials, can be fabricated in a much more facile manner and explosive accidents can be avoided. However, challenges such as high metal usage, side reactions and poor reversibility of the Zn anode and unsatisfactory performance of cathode materials severely affect the energy/power density and lifespan of RAZIBs. More so, the poor understanding of charge storage mechanisms is a major hindrance to further design. Therefore, scalable RAZIBs are not yet developed.To solve these issues, B-DECENT will undertake fundamental and practical research with the following objectives: 1. Anode fabrication: Understand Zn stripping/plating behaviour to enable fabrication of Zn metal-less anodes.2. In-situ solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formation: Construct self-healing SEIs, and evaluate their influence on Zn-less anodes,especially under high depth of discharge.3. Conversion-type cathode design: Develop and synthesise economically viable conversion-type cathodes, and evaluate their chargestorage performance.4. Cathode mechanism study: Understand process-structure-property-performance relations of cathode materials.5. Device configuration: Parametrise the manufacturing processes to achieve anode-less, high-loading-cathode RAZIBs; fabricate andevaluate proof-of-concept batteries based on above new designs to validate manufacturing strategies.