MGX Minerals Inc. (CSE:XMG) (FRA:1MG) (OTCPINK:MGXMF) said that its collaborative research partnership with the University of British Columbia (UBC) has developed a new dendrite free Zinc-Ion battery under US Provisional Patent #62/993,177.
From a report published in the 'Royal Journal of Chemistry: Journal of Material Chemistry', the company noted: "Rechargeable aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs) have attracted increasing attention as an energy storage technology for large-scale applications, due to their high capacity (820 mA h g1 and 5854 A h L1), inherently high safety, and their low cost.
"However, the overall performance of ZIBs has been seriously hindered by the poor rechargeability of Zn anodes, because of the dendrite growth, passivation, and hydrogen evolution problems associated with Zn anodes. Herein, Al2O3 coating by an atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique was developed to address the aforementioned problems and improve the rechargeability of Zn anodes for ZIBs."
The report continued: "By coating the Zn plate with an ultrathin Al2O3 layer, the wettability of Zn was improved and corrosion was inhibited. As a result, the formation of Zn dendrites was effectively suppressed, with a significantly improved lifetime in the Zn-Zn symmetric cells. With the optimized coating thickness of 100 cycles, 100Al2O3@Zn symmetric cells showed a reduced overpotential (36.5 mV) and a prolonged life span (over 500 h) at 1 mA cm2.
"In addition, the 100Al2O3@Zn has been verified in Zn-MnO2 batteries using layered d-MnO2 as the cathode and consequently exhibits superior electrochemical performance with a high capacity retention of 89.4% after over 1000 cycles at a current density of 1 mA cm2 (3.33C for MnO2) was demonstrated.
The report concluded: "It is expected that this work will provide new insight into interfacial engineering for metal anodes and into the fundamental understanding of interfacial phenomena for high-performance metal-based batteries."
MGX Minerals is a diversified Canadian resource and technology company with interests in global advanced material, energy and water assets.
Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com