Preparation of a porous graphite felt electrode for advance vanadium redox flow batteries

Lei Zhang; Junpei Yue; Qi Deng; Wei Ling; Chun-Jiao Zhou; Xian-Xiang Zeng; Congshan Zhou; Xiong-Wei Wu; YuPing Wu

doi:10.1039/d0ra00666a

Preparation of a porous graphite felt electrode for advance vanadium redox flow batteries

RSC Adv. 2020 Apr 1;10(23):13374-13378. doi: 10.1039/d0ra00666a.

Authors

Lei Zhang^{1

2}, Junpei Yue³, Qi Deng², Wei Ling², Chun-Jiao Zhou², Xian-Xiang Zeng², Congshan Zhou¹, Xiong-Wei Wu², YuPing Wu^{2

4}

Affiliations

¹ College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology Yueyang Hunan 414006 China zhoucongsh@126.com.
² School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Hunan Agricultural University Changsha Hunan 410128 China wxwcsu05@aliyun.com.
³ CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Nanostructure and Nanotechnology, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy ofSciences (CAS) Beijing 100190 China jpyue@iccas.ac.cn.
⁴ College of Energy and Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanjing Tech University Nanjing Jiangsu 211816 China wuyp@fudan.edu.cn.

Abstract

Rapid mass transfer and great electrochemical activity have become the critical points for designing electrodes in vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs). In this research, we show a porous graphite felt (GF@P) electrode to improve the electrochemical properties of VRFBs. The generation of pores on graphite felt electrodes is based on etching effects of iron to carbon. The voltage and energy efficiencies of VRFB based on the GF@P electrode can reach 72.6% and 70.7% at a current density of 200 mA cm^-2, respectively, which are 8.3% and 7.9% better than that of untreated GF@U (graphite felt). Further, the VRFBs based on GF@P electrodes possess supreme stability after over 500 charge-discharge cycles at 200 mA cm^-2. The high-efficiency approach reported in this study offers a new strategy for designing high-performance electrode materials applied in VRFBs.