ABSTRACT The interfacial incompatibility between inorganic metal oxides and polymers severely limits the utilization of hybrid cathodes in aqueous zinc‐ion batteries (AZIBs). Herein, we propose a Cu 2+ ion mediated interfacial reinforcement strategy guided by the hard‐soft acid‐base principle to strengthen the interaction between α‐MoO 3 and polyaniline (PANI). The introduced borderline acidic Cu 2+ ions on the α‐MoO 3 surface provides effective anchoring sites for PANI through strong Cu‐N coordination, which accelerates the in‐situ growth of PANI, suppresses polymer self‐aggregation, thus enabling a uniform coating on MoO 3 nanorods. In addition, Cu 2+ incorporation selectively promotes the exposure of MoO 3 facets that are thermodynamically favorable for PANI adsorption, further enhancing interfacial compatibility. As such, the PANI loading is increased by 66.79%, forming a conformal shell structure on MoO 3 . The hybrid cathode exhibits suppressed proton penetration, mitigated parasitic reactions, accelerated zinc ion transport kinetics, and robust structural integrity. Consequently, the cathode delivers a high specific capacity of 397.20 mAh g − 1 at 0.2 A g − 1 and maintains 278.35 mAh g − 1 even at 10 A g − 1 . After 5000 cycles at 5.0 A g − 1 , it retains 98.95% of its initial capacity with Coulombic efficiency approaching unity (∼100%) in AZIBs. This work provides a general interfacial engineering strategy for constructing high performance hybrid electrodes.
Wáng et al. (Wed,) studied this question.