Interfacial Stress Chemistry in Zinc Anodes for Aqueous Zinc‐Ion Batteries

Abstract

Aqueous zinc‐ion batteries (AZIBs) have emerged as promising candidates for grid‐scale and wearable energy storage applications owing to their intrinsic safety, low cost, and high theoretical capacity of Zn anodes. However, their practical deployment remains severely constrained by the poor reversibility and structural instability of Zn anodes during cycling, which have conventionally been attributed to isolated electrochemical failures, such as dendrite growth and parasitic water‐induced side reactions. Increasing evidence reveals these degradations originate from a self‐amplifying electrochemical‐mechanical coupling process involving interfacial stress evolution. Nevertheless, a unified mechanics‐centered framework for understanding failure mechanisms in AZIBs is still lacking, while the secondary stress effects induced by mainstream modification strategies have been largely overlooked. In this review, we establish a comprehensive electrochemical‐mechanical coupling framework to systematically elucidate the multiple origins of interfacial stress, critically assess state‐of‐the‐art stress characterization techniques, and explicitly uncover the mechanical mismatch and secondary stress effects associated with widely adopted anode modification strategies. Furthermore, we reorganize stress‐regulation strategies according to the mitigation of residual, induced, and crystallization stresses, and discuss the key challenges and forward‐looking research directions, providing fundamental mechanistic insights for rational design of ultra‐stable Zn anodes to advance AZIB commercialization.