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Dendrite growth of metal anodes is one of the key hindrances for both secondary aqueous metal batteries and nonaqueous metal batteries. In this work, a freestanding Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn paper is designed as both zinc metal anode and lithium metal anode host to address the issue. The binder-free Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn paper exhibits merits of good mechanical flexibility, high electronic conductivity, hydrophilicity, and lithiophilicity. The crystal growth mechanism of Zn metal on common Zn foil and Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn composite is also studied. It is found that the Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn paper can effectively suppress the dendrite growth of Zn, enabling reversible and fast Zn plating/stripping kinetics in an aqueous electrolyte. Moreover, the Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn paper can be used as a 3D host for a lithium metal anode. In this host, Zn is utilized as a nucleation agent to suppress the Li dendrite growth. The freestanding Ti3C2Tx MXene@Zn@Li anode exhibits superior reversibility with high Coulombic efficiency (97.69% over 600 cycles at 1.0 mA cm–2) and low polarization compared with the Cu@Li anode. These findings may be useful for the design of dendrite-free metal-based energy storage systems.
Tian et al. (Fri,) studied this question.