Promising Material Based on Paraffin‐Impregnated Graphite Foil with Increased Electrochemical Stability for Bipolar Plates of Vanadium Redox Flow Battery

Abstract

The development of effective power sources is a major challenge for global energetics. Among various power sources, the redox flow batteries (RFB) have distinctive feature due to the flexibility of adjusting the capacity and power to the needs of the customer. The vanadium RFBs are already available in the stationary storage market, but their widespread distribution requires a significant reduction in the levelized cost of storage (LCOS). Therefore, a number of works are devoted to the development of more available materials for the RFB. The utilization of affordable graphite foil (GF) for fabricating bipolar plates as well as a method for increasing its electrochemical stability by a fluoropolymer were earlier proposed. In this work, we have demonstrated an approach to significantly reduce the porosity of GF by impregnation with paraffin P-2. Such modification significantly increases GF stability and retains the RFB performance at a high level comparable to commercial graphite.