Multivalent Zinc Ion, Nickel Ion and Magananese Ion Batteries: Recent Progress and Battery Products

Due to the energy crisis and environmental deterioration, our society seeks the safety, environmentally friendly, and low cost batteries to meet the demand of the “next generation” electric or electrical devices. The state-of-the-art batteries generally utilize univalent ions (i.e. H + Na + or Li + ) as media for energy storage. More recently, we have firstly proposed a storage mechanism of multivalent ion (Ni 2+ , Zn 2+ , Mg 2+ , Ca 2+ , Ba 2+ , or La 3+ ions) as a new strategy for energy storage, in which multivalent ions rather than conventional univalent ions are used as medium for energy storage. This is a new strategy providing possibility for invention of new safety and ecofriendly energy devices based on various multivalent ions instead of conventional univalent ions. Since I invented three kinds of rechargeable multivalent ion batteries, named as zinc ion, nickel ion and manganese ion batteries, the researchers around the world have paid much attentions on the multivalent ion batteries. At first, I will summarize the recent progress on these multivalent ion batteries. And the ion storage mechanism of multivalent ions (Ni 2+ , Zn 2+ , Mg 2+ , Ca 2+ , Ba 2+ , Sr 2+ or La 3+ ions) and univalent ions (Li + , Na + or K + ) in specific nanostructure materials will be discussed in detail [1,2] . Subsequently, we firstly introduce the battery produts of multivalent zinc ion batteries. The cylinder and prismatic zinc ion battery products show promising performance. They are totally eco-friendly, low cost and safety. These multivalent ion products exhibit a high energy density up to 110 Wh/Kg, cycle life up to over 500 times at 1C/1C, and fast charge/discharge ability up to 20C/20C over 2000 times. This is the first step to commercialize the multivalent zinc ion, nickel ion and manganese ion batteries. With the future improvement both on the charge storage mechanism and technology, I believe that the multivalent ion batteries are the altinatives to the unsafety lithium batteries. Reference [1] Xu, C., et al, Secondary batteries with multivalent ions for energy storage, Scientific reports , 2015, 1283 : 14120; [2] Xu, C., et al , Energetic zinc ion chemistry: the rechargeable zinc ion battery. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2012 , 51 , 933 Acknowledgements: We thank the financial surppots from NSFC, 973, and Shenzhen Technical Plan Projects.