Rocking-Chair Ammonium-Ion Battery: A Highly Reversible Aqueous Energy Storage System

Aqueous rechargeable batteries are promising solutions for large-scale energy storage. Such batteries have the merit of low cost, innate safety, and environmental friendliness. To date, most known aqueous ion batteries employ metal cation charge carriers. Here, we report the first "rocking-chair" NH4-ion battery of the full-cell configuration by employing an ammonium Prussian white analogue, (NH4)(1.47)Ni[Fe(CN)(6)](0.88), as the cathode, an organic solid, 3,4,9,10-perylenetetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI), as the anode, and 1.0 m aqueous (NH4)(2)SO4 as the electrolyte. This novel aqueous ammonium-ion battery demonstrates encouraging electrochemical performance: an average operation voltage of ca. 1.0 V, an attractive energy density of ca. 43 Wh kg(-1) based on both electrodes' active mass, and excellent cycle life over 1000 cycles with 67% capacity retention. Importantly, the topochemistry results of NH4+ in these electrodes point to a new paradigm of NH4+-based energy storage.