A Highly Reversible Zn Anode with Intrinsically Safe Organic Electrolyte for Long-Cycle-Life Batteries.

Dendrite and interfacial reactions have affected zinc (Zn) metal anodes for rechargeable batteries many years. Here, these obstacles are bypassed via adopting an intrinsically safe trimethyl phosphate (TMP)-based electrolyte to build a stable Zn anode. Along with cycling, pristine Zn foil is gradually converted to a graphene-analogous deposit via TMP surfactant and a Zn phosphate molecular template. This novel Zn anode morphology ensures long-term reversible plating/stripping performance over 5000 h, a rate capability of 5 mA cm-2 , and a remarkably high Coulombic efficiency (CE) of ≈99.57% without dendrite formation. As a proof-of-concept, a Zn-VS2 full cell demonstrates an ultralong lifespan, which provides an alternative for electrochemical energy storage devices.