Alkaline zinc-based flow battery: chemical stability, morphological evolution, and performance of zinc electrode with ionic liquid

Abstract

Zinc-based flow battery is an energy storage technology with good application prospects because of its advantages of abundant raw materials, low cost, and environmental friendliness. The chemical stability of zinc electrodes exposed to electrolyte is a very important issue for zinc-based batteries. This paper reports on details of chemical stability of the zinc metal exposed to a series of solutions, as well as the relationship between the morphological evolution of zinc electrodes and their properties in an alkaline medium. Chemical corrosion of zinc electrodes by the electrolyte will change their surface morphology. However, we observed that chemical corrosion is not the main contributor to the evolution of zinc electrode surface morphology, but the main contributor is the Zn/Zn²⁺ electrode process. The morphological evolution of zinc electrodes was controlled by using ionic liquids, 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (EMIA), and 1-propylsulfonic-3-methylimidazolium tosylate (PSMIT), and the electrode performance was recorded during the morphological evolution process. It was observed that the reversible change of zinc electrode morphology was accompanied by better electrode performance.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

alkaline medium / morphological evolution / zinc-based flow battery / new energy

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Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 21361010 and 22065014), the National Innovation Training Program (Grant No. 202210407024), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (Grant No. 20171BAB206001), and the Education Department of Jiangxi Province (Grant No. GJJ190433).

Online Appendix

Electronic supplementary material (ESM) can be found in the online version at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11706-024-0681-0 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/foms/EN/10.1007/s11706-024-0681-0 that includes Fig. S1.

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