Gold coating could solve long-standing challenge with zinc batteries

As the demand for more reliable power systems grows in the renewable energy sector, the race is on to develop batteries that cost less but have a longer lifespan.

While zinc-based batteries are safer and more cost-effective than lithium-ion batteries, a major obstacle to their use in large-scale, grid storage is their shorter lifespan. They fail sooner because they develop tiny, tree-shaped metal structures on the anode called dendrites, which cause the battery to short circuit.

Now researchers from Concordia University have found a way to slow dendrite formation. Using the ultrabright X-rays of the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan, they found that “sprinkling” a small amount of gold nanoparticles on a battery’s inner surface can cut dendrite growth by up to 50 times compared to regular zinc batteries. Their gold-treated batteries went on to work for more than 6,000 hours in lab settings.

“Coating the electrode is known to improve battery performance, but the small quantity of particles needed for our technique and how they are arranged on the battery surface is a very new, exciting finding,” says Seungil Lee, a PhD student at Concordia and lead author of the team’s paper, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Although gold is expensive, the technique the researchers developed – which sparsely distributes particles on less than 10 per cent of the battery surface – could be relatively cheap to implement for large-scale battery applications.

“Because of the way that we make it, which doesn’t require any special lab conditions and only small amounts of gold, it just becomes dead cheap to put gold particles on the surface, it’s 1/100th of the price of regular gold coatings,” says Ayse Turak, Associate Professor, Physics, and Lee’s supervisor.

“It was a revelation for us. There's so little material on the surface that it's almost impossible to characterize by any other means. But X-rays at the CLS provide a very strong signal, so we can see it and we can confirm it's there, and where it sits on the surface,” added Turak.

Now the team is studying how the particle-coating technology could perform with copper electrodes for next-generation anode-free batteries. They are also investigating whether sparse nanoparticles could be used beyond batteries, in other technologies such as sensors, photovoltaics, and lighting.

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Lee, Seungil, Pedro Oliveira, Mehdi Shamekhi, Raaja Rajeshwari Manickam, Woo Young Kim, Jong Hyun Lim, and Ayse Turak. "Sparse Au nanoparticle arrays modulate Zn nucleation pathways and ion transport: a mechanistic approach to dendrite-free aqueous battery cycling." Journal of Materials Chemistry A (2026).  https://doi.org/10.1039/D5TA08137H

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Canadian Light Source
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