Ultralow-Temperature Aqueous Conductive Polymer–Hydrogen Gas Battery
Qia Peng, Zhengxin Zhu, Taoli Jiang, Zaichun Liu, Yahan Meng, Shuang Liu, Yuan Yuan, Kai Zhang, Zehui Xie, Xinhua Zheng, Jingwen Xu, Wei Chen
Abstract
Hydrogen gas batteries are regarded as one of the most promising rechargeable battery systems for large-scale energy storage applications due to their advantages of high rates and long-term cycle lives. However, the development of cost-effective and low-temperature-tolerant hydrogen gas batteries is highly desirable yet very challenging. Herein, we report a novel conductive polymer–hydrogen gas battery that is suitable for ultralow-temperature energy storage applications and consists of a hydrogen gas anode, a conductive polymer cathode using polyaniline (PANI) or polypyrrole as examples, and protonic acidic electrolytes. The PANI–H2 battery using 1 M H2SO4 as the electrolyte exhibits a capacity of 67 mA h/g, a remarkable rate up to 15 A/g, a Coulombic efficiency around 100%, and an ultra-long life of 10,000 cycles. Using the anti-freezing 9 M H3PO4 electrolyte, the PANI–H2 battery can operate well at temperatures down to −70 °C, which maintains ∼70% of the capacity at room temperature and shows an excellent cycle stability under −60 °C. Benefiting from the fast redox kinetics of both electrodes, this work demonstrates excellent rate performance and low-temperature feasibility of conductive polymer-H2 batteries, providing a new avenue for further development of low-cost and reliable polymer-H2 batteries for large-scale energy storage.