Evaluation of zinc-air battery for commercial scale applications

Abstract

Zinc air batteries (ZABs) are a promising candidate in the discovery of cheaper and more environmentally-friendly infrastructure with their high energy density and high cost efficiency for large scale energy storage and use in power sources that could potentially have applications in the booming electrical vehicle industry. However, there have historically been many challenges that plagued the development of commercially viable secondary ZABs such as battery design, water-based side reactions and dendritic growth of the zinc anode which greatly reduce the lifespan of the secondary ZAB. Much progress has been made in the recent years towards the development of efficient bifunctional catalysts for Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR) and Oxidation Evolution Reactions (OER), anode designs that suppress the formation of zinc dendrites and the use of separators within the battery cell that effectively lengthens the cycle life of the secondary ZAB. This paper aims to study the progress in development of ZABs through testing several different types of catalysts, anode modification methods and multiple types of multifunctional separator to evaluate if the existing ZAB technology is sufficiently mature to support the development of commercially viable products based on the approaches tested in this paper.