Lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones to electric cars, but they rely on scarce materials, can catch fire, and struggle to store enough energy cheaply for the grid. This project replaces them with batteries that use zinc and water instead. The problem is that current zinc-based batteries waste metal, suffer from unwanted chemical reactions, and wear out too quickly. Researchers do not fully understand how they store charge, which blocks better designs. B-DECENT tackles these issues head-on. It will develop anodes that use almost no zinc, create self-healing protective layers inside the battery, and design new cathode materials that store charge through chemical conversion rather than simple ion insertion. If successful, the project could produce a battery that is safer, cheaper, and made from abundant materials—no lithium, no flammable solvents. That matters for energy grids that need to store solar and wind power for when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. The work is a mix of fundamental science—understanding exactly how zinc ions move and react—and practical engineering to scale up manufacturing. A deeper grasp of these charge-storage mechanisms could also unlock other aqueous battery chemistries down the line.
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In the era of carbon neutrality and growing energy demands, clean energy technologies are immensely important. Considering the uncertainty and intermittency of solar and wind power, state-of-the-art electrochemical energy storage (EES) technologies are required to facilitate supply on demand. However, current EES devices rely heavily on Li-ion batteries, which have inherent performance, safety, availability, and cost limitations. Rechargeable aqueous Zn-ion batteries (RAZIBs) have remarkable proven potential as disruptive technology for next-generation EES devices as they promise much lower costs, abundant supply of raw materials, can be fabricated in a much more facile manner and explosive accidents can be avoided. However, challenges such as high metal usage, side reactions and poor reversibility of the Zn anode and unsatisfactory performance of cathode materials severely affect the energy/power density and lifespan of RAZIBs. More so, the poor understanding of charge storage mechanisms is a major hindrance to further design. Therefore, scalable RAZIBs are not yet developed. To solve these issues, B-DECENT will undertake fundamental and practical research with the following objectives: 1. Anode fabrication: Understand Zn stripping/plating behaviour to enable fabrication of Zn metal-less anodes. 2. In-situ solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formation: Construct self-healing SEIs, and evaluate their influence on Zn-less anodes, especially under high depth of discharge. 3. Conversion-type cathode design: Develop and synthesise economically viable conversion-type cathodes, and evaluate their charge storage performance. 4. Cathode mechanism study: Understand process-structure-property-performance relations of cathode materials. 5. Device configuration: Parametrise the manufacturing processes to achieve anode-less, high-loading-cathode RAZIBs; fabricate and evaluate proof-of-concept batteries based on above new designs to validate manufacturing strategies.
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