Construction of High-Performance Membranes for Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries: Challenges, Development, and Perspectives

While being a promising candidate for large-scale energy storage, the current market penetration of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) is still limited by several challenges. As one of the key components in VRFBs, a membrane is employed to separate the catholyte and anolyte to prevent the vanadium ions from cross-mixing while allowing the proton conduction to maintain charge balance in the system during operation. To overcome the weakness of commercial membranes, various types of membranes, ranging from ion exchange membranes with diverse functional groups to non-ionic porous membranes, have been designed and reported to achieve higher ionic conductivity while maintaining low vanadium ion permeability, thus…

• QU
  Queensland University of Technology
• CF
  Centre for Materials Science, Queensland University of Technology