Engineering Covalent Organic Frameworks toward Advanced Zinc–Based Batteries

Zinc-based batteries (ZBBs) have demonstrated considerable potential among secondary batteries, attributing to their advantages including good safety, environmental friendliness, and high energy density. However, ZBBs still suffer from issues such as the formation of zinc dendrites, occurrence of side reactions, retardation of reaction kinetics, and shuttle effects, posing a great challenge for practical applications. As promising porous materials, covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and their derivatives have rigid skeletons, ordered structures, and permanent porosity, which endow them with great potential for application in ZBBs. This review, therefore, provides a systematic overview detailing on COFs structure pertaining to electrochemical performance of ZBBs, following an in depth discussion of the challenges faced by ZBBs, which includes dendrites and side reactions at the anode, as well as dissolution, structural change, slow kinetics, and shuttle effect at the cathode. Then, the structural advantages of COF-correlated materials and their roles in various ZBBs are highlighted. Finally, the challenges of COF-correlated materials in ZBBs are outlined and an outlook on the future development of COF-correlated materials for ZBBs is provided. The review would serve as a valuable reference for further research into the utilization of COF-correlated materials in ZBBs.