A novel solvent-template method to manufacture nano-scale porous membranes for vanadium flow battery applications

Abstract

A solvent-template method is proposed for manufacturing ion conducting membranes (ICMs) with controlled ion transport channels (in nano-scale) for vanadium flow battery (VFB) application. As a result, the ion transport properties and single cell performance of the ICMs could be easily tuned by this method. The VFB single cell assembled with the prepared ICMs achieved CE over 99% and EE over 92% when operated under a current density of 40 mA cm⁻², which is among the excellent performances ever studied for VFB porous ICMs. The solvent-template method proposed in this article is promising for fabricating high performance ICMs for the VFB as well as other potential battery systems.