Exploring innovative trends and advancements in rechargeable zinc-air batteries

Zn-air batteries (ZABs) are rapidly taking precedence as an extremely desirable alternative for energy storage devices in electronic devices and electric vehicles, due to their substantial theoretical energy density, and economical, and environmentally benign properties. There is a need to design a robust and stable electrocatalyst to overcome the sluggish kinetics and dissolution of zinc metal in the electrolyte. Therefore, this review presents the correlation between various battery components, insights into the structural/activity relation, and facile synthesis techniques. A detailed section particularly focused on the performance of noble metals has been devoted including advanced characterization techniques and DFT calculations. Furthermore, the advancement in the ZABs with the single, bi-, and tri-metallic catalysts has been particularly discussed to correlate the structure–activity relationships. In addition, the state of the art of solid-state batteries and their performance in ZABs has been explored. Finally, the challenges and outlooks for ZABs, which create promising prospects for the energy and electronic industries have been discussed along with the discussions based on the recent advancements.