A facile and eco-efficient additive strategy enables high-performance aqueous zinc-ion batteries

High-performance aqueous zinc-ion batteries as one of the most promising battery systems have attracted much attention in the development of next-generation advanced energy storage systems. However, the development of AZIBs has been plagued by inherent issues, such as growth of zinc dendrites, irreversible dissolution of manganese-based cathode materials, hydrogen precipitation reaction, and other side reactions. In this work, we developed a facile and eco-efficient strategy that adopted an optimized electrolyte additive of Al₂(SO₄)₃ in the ZnSO₄-based electrolytes for AZIBs. The electrochemical, spectroscopic, and microscopic characterization results demonstrated that the optimized aluminum sulfate additives can inhibit the Zn dendrite formation, reduce the generation of dead manganese and stabilize the crystalline structure of the manganese-based cathode. The Zn||MnO₂ full cell exhibits a high discharge plateau of ∼1.65 V and excellent cycling stability with a high-capacity retention of 78% even after 1200 cycles at 1C with a high active material loading (∼8.0 mg cm^-2). This facile and eco-efficient strategy provides a promising and high-efficient strategy to design high-performance AZIBs for energy storage systems.