Zinc battery reaches impressive 100,000-cycle life with German innovation
A protective polymer layer allows zinc ions to flow while blocking water molecules and hydrogen formation.
A new approach developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) involving a porous organic polymer has significantly extended the lifespan of zinc-ion batteries.
Instead of a few thousand cycles, batteries using this polymer at their anode can last several hundred thousand cycles, a university press release said.
As countries aim to boost their clean energy production over the next few years, solar and wind power plants are being commissioned at an unprecedented scale. However, the intermittent nature of the energy production facilities requires a large-scale energy storage solution for them to be truly effective.
Lithium-ion batteries are humanity’s best energy storage solution. However, deploying them at scale to carry out the energy transition requires vast amounts of lithium, which makes them expensive and unsustainable in the long run.
Researchers have been working on an effective, inexpensive, yet scalable alternative to lithium in batteries, and zinc can potentially fulfill that role.
Zinc-ion batteries
Zinc-ion batteries (ZIB) operate using the same mechanism as Lithium-ion batteries. The metal acts as the anode, while a zinc intercalating material serves as a cathode. The battery has a high energy density and is not prone to fires like its Li-ion counterpart.
The abundance of zinc in nature makes ZIBs cost-effective and sustainable, while their fast charging and discharging capabilities make them ideal for commercial use as well. Zinc batteries have a longer lifespan than Li-ion batteries. Still, issues of “zinc dendrites” and undesirable side reactions have stalled their wide-scale