Manipulation of facet zincophilicity of protective coatings for long lifetime zinc anodes

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries are considered to be a promising technology for large scale energy storage deployment due to their advantages of low cost and high security. However, the zinc anodes suffer long-standing problems of uncontrollable dendrite growth and unstable interfacial chemistry that hinder their industrial applications. In this work, we manage to manipulate the facet zincophilicity of commercial titanium oxide (TiO₂) by nitrogen implanting as a protective coating to realize long-term zinc plating/stripping. The nitrogen-implanting significantly increases the habitual facet zincophilicity of TiO₂ layer to enable uniform and fast zinc deposition kinetics. Impressively, the as-protected Zn anode could be operated for a long lifespan of 2400 h accompanying with a high cumulative capacity of 4.1 Ah cm^-2 and a stable Coulombic efficiency of 99.53 % over 900 cycles. This work will shed new insight on the importance of manipulating the facet zincophicility of protective coatings for dendrite-free metal anodes beyond zinc chemistry.