Pathways towards High-Performance Aqueous Zinc-Organic Batteries

An increasingly growing market for electricity energy will be projected to double by 2050. Renewable energies, such as solar and wind, can be an effective way to address the challenge. However, the incompatibility between generation and consumption of electricity arises a considerable trouble when a huge amount of electricity coming from renewable sources finds no users, which could result in miserable failure of an aging grid. To secure the grid, the utilization and development of efficient energy storage technologies are highly demanded. Among the energy storage system (ESS), aqueous Zinc (Zn) batteries based organic material cathode have been regarded as an attractive candidate on account of its outstanding superiorities compared with inorganic compounds. Although it has gained huge success in lab-scale, the long-standing challenges like inferior energy density, low power density, narrow operation temperature range and poor cycling life still restrict their practical application in aqueous Zn batteries (AZBs). In this minireview, we firstly provide a comprehensive insight into the different storage mechanisms that are proposed in varieties of organic cathodes. Based on the clear understanding on mechanisms, we further summarize the major progress and offer several promising research directions on promoting electrochemical performance of Zn-organic batteries.