HIU Seminar | Dr. Yurong Zhou
Dr. Yurong Zhou from the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) will be guest during the upcoming HIU Seminar taking place on Tuesday, 16th June 2026 at 4:00 pm: The talk will be held in person in the large seminar room (230) at the HIU and streamed under the usual Zoom link: The title of the talk will be "Engineering Stable Aqueous Zn Metal Anodes: From Deposition Behavior to Interfacial Chemistry”.
Abstract
Electrochemical Aqueous Zn-based batteries have emerged as one of the promising post-lithium-ion chemistries for safe, low-cost and sustainable energy storage, especially for applications where material abundance and intrinsic safety are critical.
Yet their development still is limited by parasitic reaction, electrolyte performance and reversibility of Zn metal anode. In this seminar, I will focus on how Zn deposition and interfacial chemistry can be understood and regulated by connecting experimental electrochemical results with mechanistic insights from theoretical simulations.
With this in mind, I will structure the talk through three connected parts: i) 3D carbon nanotube (CNT) conductive architectures for Zn-ion energy storage; ii) Capacitive CNT interfaces and their extension to CNT-containing electrolytes and gels, where conductive nano-media reshape the interfacial process; and iii) Decoupling interfacial reactions, where electrochemical characterization is combined with density functional theory (DFT) and ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) to examine how Zn-related deposition pathways can be decoupled from water/proton-driven parasitic chemistry.
I hope these examples will offer useful perspectives for designing stable Zn interfaces, and also for addressing similar challenges in other battery chemistries.