Membraneless flow battery leveraging flow-through heterogeneous porous media for improved power density and reduced crossover

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel membraneless flow battery design using heterogeneous porous media, achieving higher power density and reduced crossover, potentially advancing cost-effective energy storage for renewable sources.

Contribution

The study presents a new flow battery architecture with porous media replacing membranes, validated by experiments, offering improved performance and lower costs.

Findings

Power density of 0.925 W/cm2 achieved

Maximum current density of 3 A/cm2 demonstrated

Reduced crossover of reactive species compared to traditional systems

Abstract

A key factor preventing the market penetration of renewable, intermittent energy sources, such as solar, wind and wave, is the lack of cost-effective energy storage options to counteract intermittency. Here, we propose and demonstrate a novel flow battery architecture that replaces traditional ion-exchange membranes with less expensive heterogeneous flow-through porous media. We present an experimentally-validated model which demonstrates that our architecture promises reduced crossover of reactive species compared to typical membraneless systems employing co-laminar flows in open channels. In addition, our prototype battery exhibits significantly improved power density (0.925 W/cm2) and maximum current density (3 A/cm2) compared to previous membraneless systems.