Abstract
Aqueous zinc-ion batteries offer inherent safety and low cost, yet performance is limited by unstable zinc metal negative electrodes and dissolution-prone positive electrodes, causing dendrite growth, sluggish ion transport, and rapid capacity decay. Replacing both electrodes with intercalation hosts provides a solution, but progress is slowed by the lack of a universal principle for selecting kinetically compatible pairs. Most existing efforts optimize single components rather than addressing the electrodes’ kinetic mismatch governing full-cell stability. Here we show a machine-learning-assisted kinetic-matching framework that quantitatively evaluates ion-transport compatibility in intercalation-type zinc-ion batteries electrodes. By correlating interlayer spacing with Zn2+ diffusion behavior, the model introduces two descriptors predicting synchronized ion flux for rational electrode pairing. Using this framework, an optimized Zn3V3O8 | |NH4V4O10 system achieves a specific capacity of 310 mAh g-1 and retains over 12,000 cycles at 5 A g-1. The strategy further extends to deformable formats through conductive hydrogel architectures, enabling omnidirectionally stretchable, all-hydrogel zinc-ion batteries with an areal capacity of 1.2 mAh cm-2 and an energy density of 1070 μWh cm-2. These results provide a quantitative design route for next-generation zinc-ion batteries.
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Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary information files. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The machine learning code supporting the findings of this study has been deposited in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/rachelyyr-llamama/ML/blob/main and is publicly available under the MIT License. The raw database used for model training comes from the experimental results as listed in Data availability. A permanent, citable version of the code and the complete training dataset has been assigned the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17827952. The training dataset generated for and used in this study has also been deposited in the same repository70.
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Acknowledgements
This work is financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2023YFC3009502 from W.Z.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.52371134 from W.Z.), Joint Funds of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U23A20574 from Z.S.), Youth Foundation of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.22408047 from T.S.), Youth Foundation of the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20241330 from T.S.), Aeronautical Science Foundation of China (2023Z015069001 from W.Z.), the Start-up Research Fund of Southeast University (No. RF1028623040 from T.S.). This research work is supported by the BigData Computing Center of Southeast University.
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Q.X. conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript. Y.Y. conducted the calculations and wrote the relevant part. D.Q. and H.X. helped with the data collection and analysis. H.Z., S.-Z.K.-C., and T.W. contributed to the experiments and graphic design. T.S. conceived, supervised the project, and revised the manuscript. W.Z. and Z.S. discussed and reviewed the manuscript. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript.
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Xie, Q., You, Y., Qiao, D. et al. Machine learning-assisted kinetic matching model for rational electrode design in aqueous zinc-ion batteries. Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67996-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67996-8
