Gold coating could solve long-standing challenge with zinc batteries

As the demand for more reliable power systems increases in the renewable energy sector, there is a race to develop batteries that cost less but have a longer lifespan.

While zinc-based batteries are safer and more cost-effective than lithium-ion batteries, a major obstacle to their use in large-scale grid storage is their short lifetime. They fail quickly because they develop tiny, tree-shaped metal structures called dendrites on the anode, which cause the battery to short circuit.

Now researchers at Concordia University have found a way to slow down dendrite formation. Using ultrabright Their gold-treated batteries operated for more than 6,000 hours in a laboratory setting.

Coating the electrodes improves battery performance, but the small amount of particles required for our technology and how they are arranged on the battery surface is a very new, exciting discovery.

Says Seungil Lee, a PhD student at Concordia and lead author of the team’s paper published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Although gold is expensive, the technology the researchers developed – which distributes the particles over less than 10 percent of a battery’s surface – could be relatively cheap to implement for large-scale battery applications.

The way we make it requires no special lab conditions and only a small amount of gold, making it extremely cheap to put gold particles on a surface, it’s 1/100th the price of a regular gold coating.

says Ayse Turk, associate professor of physics and Lee’s supervisor.

This was a revelation for us. There is so little material on the surface that it is almost impossible to describe it by any other means. But the X-rays in the CLS provide a very strong signal, so we can see it and confirm that it’s there, and where it sits on the surface.

Turk added.

Now the team is studying how the particle-coating technology might perform with copper electrodes for the next generation of anode-free batteries. They are also investigating whether sparse nanoparticles could be used beyond batteries, in other technologies such as sensors, photovoltaics and lighting.

Watch a video about this research

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More CLS science highlights

The Canadian Light Source (CLS) is a national research facility of the University of Saskatchewan and one of the largest science projects in Canadian history. More than 1,000 academic, government and industry scientists from around the world use CLS each year in innovative health, agriculture, environmental and advanced materials research.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Government of Saskatchewan and the University of Saskatchewan fund CLS operations.

greg baskey
communications coordinator
canadian light source
306-370-9446
greg.basky@lightsource.ca