A Polysulfide/Ferricyanide Redox Flow Battery with Extended Cycling

Abstract

The inexpensive sulfur raw material is promising to enable cost-effective redox flow batteries for long duration energy storage. But the catastrophic through-membrane crossover of polysulfides remains a severe challenge resulting in irreversible performance degradation and short cycle life. In this work, we demonstrate that use of a permselective cation exchange membrane yields two orders of magnitude enhancement in polysulfide retention compared to the benchmark Nafion membrane. Combined physico-chemical, spectroscopic, and microscopic analyses unravel smaller ion transport channel sizes in the microstructure of this membrane that contribute to the effective mitigation of polysulfide crossover. As a result, the cycle life of polysulfide/ferricyanide flow cells is boosted over a substantially extended test time. This finding sheds light on the fundamental membrane factors that cause polysulfide permeation and can suggest feasible directions in the development of permselective membranes for polysulfide flow batteries.