Recent progress of carbon nanomaterials for high-performance cathodes and anodes in aqueous zinc ion batteries

Aqueous zinc ion batteries (ZIBs) hold great potential for safe and large-scale energy storage applications. However, inferior energy density and service life of both cathodes and anodes severely hinder practical applications of ZIBs. Fortunately, carbon nanomaterials with high conductivity, chemical stability, and tunable surface chemistry, show great promise for addressing the mentioned challenges in ZIBs. Herein, we firstly summarize the main challenges of traditional ZIBs, then recent advances of carbon nanomaterials in both cathodes and anodes of ZIBs are elaborately demonstrated, in which the key roles of carbon nanomaterials with unique properties are highlighted as conductive substrates, conductive matrixes, encapsulating layers, current collectors for cathodes, and Zn host materials and protecting layers for anodes. Most importantly, the presence of carbon nanomaterials is specially emphasized for enhanced zinc storage performance and new-concept ZIBs (e.g., flexible and fiber-shaped batteries). Finally, several challenges and perspectives of carbon nanomaterials for high-performance ZIBs are briefly discussed.