Design of Surface-Nanoengineered Hybrid Membranes for High-Performance Redox Flow Batteries

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The demand for electricity is steadily increasing, driven by both population growth and greater dissemination of modern electrical devices to an increasing fraction of the population. A growth of renewable energy technologies will help to accommodate this growing demand for electricity, provided that energy storage technologies address the intermittency of solar and wind power. The proverbial energy storage technology is the battery, which generally conducts electrons extracted from a solid-state material through a precisely defined conduit which creates electricity. However, the use of existing batteries on the scale needed for the electrical power grid is not practical. Liquid flow batteries offer an alternative for energy storage, and have attracted recent attention due to design flexibility and safe large-scale operation. For commercialization, the performance of the membrane that conducts ions and electrons to complete the electrical circuit needs to be improved. Specifically, existing polymer-based ion exchange membranes have poor mechanical stability and low ion selectivity that limit performance and decrease energy efficiency. This project will interface novel uniform two-dimensional nanostructures into existing membrane, while also developing transport models to fundamentally understand the ion transport in these materials.This project will deposit nanopatterns of one-atom-thick boron nitride two-dimensional materials onto existing ion exchange membranes. The boron nitride will selectively increase proton conductivity over transport of the vanadium ion. Nanochannels will be engineered onto the surface of the membrane to retain water in order to decouple ion conductivity and selectivity. Electrochemical performance of the hybrid membranes will be benchmarked against industry-standards, for both energy efficiency and stability. Results will be used to enhance the fundamental understanding of ion transport through the materials. The project will support and train one graduate student and several undergraduate students, and complementary hands-on research experiences for high school teachers will help to disseminate the research methods to a broader community.