Growing energy demand drives the need for grid scale energy storage systems to facilitate the integration of wind and solar energy into the global power supply. Non-aqueous redox flow batteries have emerged as promising systems for large-capacity, reversible energy storage, capable of meeting the variable demands of the electrical grid. In this work, we investigate the potential for a highly modular series of Lindqvist polyoxovanadate-alkoxide (POV-alkoxide) clusters, [V6O7(OR)12] (R = CH3, C2H5), to serve as the electroactive species for a symmetric, non-aqueous redox flow battery. We demonstrate that the physical and electrochemical properties of these POV-alkoxides makes them suitable for applications in redox flow batteries, as well as the ability for facile ligand modification at the bridging alkoxide moieties to yield significant improvements in cluster stability during charge-discharge cycling. Synthetic efforts to maximize the energy density of the POV-alkoxide charge carriers show that ligand modification has a measurable impact on the solubility of the systems, and that heterometal incorporation within the cluster can dramatically increase the working potential of the battery. Finally, we demonstrate that the bulky POV-alkoxide exhibits significant resistance to deleterious crossover, which will lead to improved lifetime and efficiency in a redox flow battery.

Polyoxovanadate-alkoxide application in non-aqueous redox flow batteries: Solutions for grid-scale energy storage

256th National Meeting (2018)

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