Increasing worldwide energy demands and rising CO2 emissions have motivated a search for new technologies to take advantage of renewables such as solar and wind energies.1 However, the renewable energies such as solar and wind energy are highly intermittent. Hence there is an ever increasing demand for storing energy after it is generated. Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are promising candidates for storing energy in grid when there is more supply than the demand, and discharges the stored energy during peak demand periods. The great advantage of RFB over other conventional batteries is the decoupled power and energy capacity and hence, the flexibility of the energy storage is enhanced. Traditional RFBs utilize inorganic compounds such as FeCl2, Zn halides, and VOSO4 as redox-active materials.2 Among numerous systems, vanadium RFBs (VRFBs) has received a great deal of commercialization efforts.3 However, the expensive and less abundant redox active materials has hindered their wide spread applications in electrochemical energy storage. To address the challenges encountered by the existing inorganic RFBs, organic RFBs (ORFBs) employing sustainable and potentially inexpensive redox-active organic molecules were proposed as the next generation of RFBs for green energy storage.4 In the past decade, significant progress has been made in the development of ORFBs, including versatile designs of redox active organic molecules and their electrolyte materials, comprehensive electrochemical and physical-organic studies, and computational modeling studies.5 In this presentation design, synthesis and application of organic electro active materials in aqueous and non-aqueous ORFBs will be discussed. Real Money Rummy proposal and some preliminary results will also be discussed along with the future plans.
References:
1. Liu, T. L et al., Adv. Energy Mater. 2016, 6, 1501449.
2. Liu, T. L et al., Ency. Inorg. Bioinorg. Chem . 2019.
3. Soloveichik, G. L et al., Chem. Rev. 2015, 115, 11533-11558.
4. Schubert, U. S et al., Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2017, 56, 686-711.
5. Liu, T. L et al., ACS Energy Lett. 2019, 4, 2220-2240.