Rechargeable zinc batteries are safe, cheap, and scalable — but their lifetime is still held back by the metallic zinc anode. In aqueous electrolytes, repeated plating and stripping drag in dendrites, hydrogen evolution, corrosion, passivation, shape change, and active-zinc isolation. Together these lower Coulombic efficiency, raise polarization, generate gas, and shorten cell life.
My new review in Journal of Alloys and Compounds argues that alloying deserves to be treated as its own materials-design field — not as one tweak among electrolytes, interphases, separators, and hosts. Once you do, composition, phase constitution, and interfacial chemistry have to be designed together, not one at a time.
Composition — what you add (Zn–Bi, Zn–Sn, Zn–In, Zn–Al, Zn–Mg, Zn–Ga, Zn–Ag, Zn–Cu…), and how much, without sacrificing the active-zinc fraction.
Phase — the phase constitution that composition and processing produce, and the phase-related risks that come with it.
Interface — the reconstructed surface chemistry that actually governs nucleation, hydrogen activity, corrosion response, and interphase stability during cycling.
Around this, the review builds a cross-system descriptor framework that links alloy composition and processing to phase distribution, surface reconstruction, zincophilicity, hydrogen activity, corrosion response, interphase stability, zinc transport, mechanical robustness, cost, and manufacturability — so binary families and zinc-rich multicomponent (“constrained-synergy”) alloys can be compared on the same terms rather than case by case.
The part closest to this group’s habit is the benchmarking. The review proposes evidence standards for validating alloy effects — gas quantification, corrosion measurement, phase and surface analysis, operando characterization, and full-cell testing under meaningful zinc utilization — because a recurring finding is that reported alloy benefits often rest on favorable test conditions rather than on direct mechanistic proof. Stated plainly: disclose the conditions, or the comparison cannot be trusted.
The aim is to move alloy selection away from empirical composition screening toward mechanism-guided, zinc-rich, electrolyte-specific, and scalable anode design.
Read the review
Kheawhom S. Alloy-based zinc anodes for rechargeable zinc batteries: Composition-phase-interface design and practical benchmarking. Journal of Alloys and Compounds 1079 (2026) 189950. DOI 10.1016/j.jallcom.2026.189950
Free full-text access until 9 September 2026: Elsevier Share Link