Recent Progress in Aqueous Zinc-ion Batteries: a Deep Insight into Zinc Metal Anodes

Aqueous zinc ion batteries (AZIBs) have recently sparked an enormous surge of research attentions, due to their eco-friendliness, low-production cost, and exceptional electrochemical performance. Nonetheless, initial exploration mainly focused on the cathode side, aiming to find out a class of promising material with high compatibility to the energy storage system, whereas issues on zinc anodes side haven not received adequate attention. To tackle the existing anodic problems (dendrite growth, corrosion issue, hydrogen evolution), up-to-date advances in tactics to realize reversible zinc anode and accordingly underlying fundamentals regarding electrode/electrolyte interface regulation are systematically summarized from the perspective of anode and electrolyte design. Finally, some general guidance and suggested future research directions to stabilize zinc metal anode are proposed for the further development of AZIBs.