A liquid metal interlayer for boosted charge transfer and dendrite-free deposition toward high-performance Zn anodes

Metallic Zn is a promising anode for aqueous Zn-ion batteries, but it suffers from dendrite formation, corrosion, and surface passivation during cycling that severely jeopardize the lifetime and charge/discharge kinetics of the battery. Herein, we propose a delayed nucleation strategy to improve the performance of Zn anodes. Through a liquid metal (LM) interlayer, the reduction and deposition of Zn are temporally and spatially separated, and thus fast Zn redox kinetics and dendrite-free Zn (002) deposition can be simultaneously achieved. The accordingly designed flexible anode (Zn@LM-AgT) demonstrates a stabilized Zn plating/stripping cycling over 700 h with a significantly reduced overpotential. When coupled with a vanadium-based cathode, the full cell delivers a sixtimes higher remaining capacity after 1000 cycles than the reference cell. Moreover, flexible batteries with good deformability are also fabricated with the Zn@LM-AgT anode, confirming the practicability of the LM interlayer. The delayed nucleation mechanism provides a novel approach to the high-performance metallic anodes.