Cycling performance and efficiency of sulfonated poly(sulfone) membranes in vanadium redox flow batteries

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• 作者：Soowhan Kim ; Jingling Yan ; Birgit Schwenzer ; Jianlu Zhang ; Liyu Li ; Jun Liu ; Zhenguo (Gary) Yang ; Michael A. Hickner
• 关键词：Sulfonated Radel ; Poly(phenylsulfone) membrane ; Vanadium redox flow battery ; Vanadium ion permeability
• 刊名：Electrochemistry Communications
• 出版年：2010
• 出版时间：November 2010
• 年：2010
• 卷：12
• 期：11
• 页码：1650-1653
• 全文大小：371 K

文摘

As an alternative to Nafion® ion exchange membrane, an inexpensive commercially-available Radel® polymer was sulfonated, fabricated into a thin membrane, and evaluated for its performance in a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB). The sulfonated Radel (S-Radel) membrane showed almost an order of magnitude lower permeability of VO²⁺ ions (2.07 × 10⁻⁷ cm²/min), compared to Nafion 117 (1.29 × 10⁻⁶ cm²/min), resulting in better coulombic efficiency (~ 98 % vs. 95 % at 50 mA/cm²) and lower capacity loss per cycle. Even though the S-Radel membrane had a slightly higher membrane resistance, the energy efficiency of the VRFB with the S-Radel membrane was comparable to that of Nafion because of its better coulombic efficiency resulting from the lower vanadium ion crossover. The S-Radel membrane exhibited good performance up to 40 cycles, but a decline in performance at later cycles was observed, likely as a result of membrane degradation.