Towards High‐Performance Aqueous Zinc Batteries via a Semi‐Conductive Bipolar‐Type Polymer Cathode
Lei Yan, Qiang Zhu, Yae Qi, Jie Xu, Peng Yu, Jie Shu, Jing Ma, Yonggang Wang
Abstract
Abstract Aqueous Zn‐organic batteries have received considerable attention owing to their green, low‐cost and high safe nature. Unfortunately, organic materials generally exhibit insulator nature (≈10 −10 S cm −1 ), and most of reported promising performances of Zn‐organic batteries are achieved with a low mass‐loading (≈2 mg cm −2 ) in cathode, which is far away from practical application (10 mg cm −2 ). Herein, we demonstrate a semi‐conductive polymer poly(1,8‐diaminonaphthalene) (PDAN) cathode material for Zn batteries, which shows a moderate electronic conductivity (5.9×10 −5 S cm −1 ). Theoretical calculations and in situ/ex situ analysis reveal that the cathode involves a bipolar‐type charge storage mechanism. Accordingly, the Zn//PDAN cell exhibits a promising capacity (140 mAh g −1 at 0.1 A g −1 ) and a remarkable cycle stability (1000 cycles without capacity fading) at a high mass‐loading (10 mg cm −2 ). These encouraging results shed light on the design of advanced organic electrode.