Preparation Of Graphene Based Porous Composite Membrane And Its Application In Vanadium Battery

With the rapid development of society,the traditional fossil energy will soon dry up.Because of the energy shortage and the growth of awareness of environmental protection,scientists start to pay close attention to the renewable energy sources such as solar,wind and so on.These renewable energy can be affected by climatic factors,when we use them to supply energy,the sustained and unstable problems will happen.Due to the lack of the energy storage equipment,the energy can not be timely and effectively stored for use when the power is not enough.Therefore,the development of energy storage technology has been a close attention at home and abroad.All vanadium redox flow battery(VRB)have some particular advantages,such as low cost,simple operation,flexible design of capacity,fast response,high energy efficiency.It is not limited by the geographical position,and it can charge and discharge in depth.In addition,it is very safe and can not cause environmental pollution.Thanks to the unique advantages,scientists think it has a promising future and is the one of the best energy storage technology.Ion exchange membrane is one of the most important parts of VRB.Its performance and price will influence the performance and scale of battery.The battery performance of Nafion is excellent,but vanadium battery most commonly used is the membrane of the cell performance,although good,but it suffers from high vanadium permeability.In the same time,it has complicated production process and expensive price,which limited seriously its scale popularization and application.Graphene is one of the most popular materials.Because the graphene is composed of a close carbon atoms layer on atoms,it can effectively prevent the particle permeability,so it can be used to hider particle permeability.Our research fancy the special properties of graphene,and choose commercial conventional polyether sulfone membrane(UH004)which is low cost as a based membrane.We transfer graphene with different layers(1,2,3)to the skin layer of the based membrane,and prepare the composite membrane.Then we will test the membrane characterization and battery performance of the composite membrane.Firstly,we will test microscopic characterization of the composite membrane by SEM to ensure that the graphene film really has attached on the surface of the based membrane.Then the performance of the composite membrane will be characterized such as membrane resistance,transport numbers,vanadium/proton permeability.According to these properties,the battery performances can be judged preliminarily.Experimental results show that the idea which we use the composite membranes of graphene and porous nanofiltration membrane as the membrane of VRB is really practical.The way can do enhance the membrane proton selectivity and improve the battery performance.