Honeycomb-Like Carbon with Doping of Transition-Metal and Nitrogen for Highly Efficient Zinc-Air Battery and Zinc-Ion Battery

The aqueous Zinc-base batteries such as the Zn-air battery and the Zn-ion battery, featured with low-cost, high safety, high specific capacity and environmental-friendliness, have attracted intensive attention for energy storage. For high performance Zinc-base batteries, the electrocatalysts with good conductivity, convenient mass transfer path and adequate accessible active sites are demanded. Herein, we have fabricated transition-metal/nitrogen co-doped honeycomb-like carbon materials with hierarchical porous structure through a freeze-drying and one-step pyrolysis method. The as-prepared FeZnN-C are used as cathode materials of Zinc-air battery, the Zinc-air battery displays high peak power density of 257 mW cm-2, superior discharging voltage platform around 1.36 V and large specific capacity of 785 mAh gZn-1. Meanwhile, the prepared Zn/ZnN-C was used as anode of a Zinc-ion battery which exhibits great cycle stability and high charging/discharge rate. Our work provides a novel and facile method to construct highly efficient electrocatalysts with hierarchical macro-meso-micro-porous structure and multi-active sites for application in the aqueous Zinc-base batteries.