Abstract
With the rapidly increasing development of global technological civilization, energy demand is increasing, too. Due to energy production system and energy storage system developing rapidly; the damage to the environment has become more and more critical. How to take account the two aspects of energy demand and environmental protection will be the focus of future energy-related technology. In the process of developing new energy technologies, the field of electric vehicles is paid the considerable attention to. Because of the insufficiency of the battery’s efficiency on the electric vehicles and the highly price on the batteries, it is needed to develop a more suitable technology for the electric vehicle energy storage. And Zinc-air battery is quite potential in this area. According to many related literatures about air battery, the researchers are devoted to improve electrical properties of charging and discharging, energy and power density and cycle life. As to the part of the metal electrode, the researchers changed the morphology of the electrode, the materials of the electrode, adding alloying elements, and the surface modification, etc. In view of the part of alkaline aqueous electrolyte, many literatures investigated the influence of additives for electrode corrosion, and improved the performance of batteries effectively. It is rare to find the literatures which mentioned both about electrode and an electrolyte additive. As a result, it will discuss for both in this study. In this study, the metal electrode with template method was produced. First of all, PU polyurethane porous foam was used as the template. And then it employed the method of activation in Palladium membrane, non-electroplated and electroplated methods of Nickel sequentially. Next, a three-dimensional electrode with stable structure was produced, and this was a unique novelty. And then the charging and discharging properties of the electrode in Zinc-air batteries was improved by plating Tin on surface modification and doing Zinc pre-deposition in this study. Concerning the electrolyte, it used Tin sheet as electrode firstly and was measured by CV curves and Tafel polarization curves to investigate the influence of additives for electrode corrosion. And according to the result of the experiment, EDTA and Tween 20 was selected as the additives for battery testing. In addition to battery testing, the material analysis was made for each step in the electrode making process, including SEM analysis for surface topography and coating thickness, EDS analysis for category and ratio of element, and XRD analysis for metal crystalline, crystal structure and element types in this study. It also discussed both the nature of the materials for the electrode, and the characteristics of electrochemical charging and discharging .