The dropping cost of wind and solar power intensifies the need for low-cost, efficient energy storage, which together with renewables can displace fossil fuels. While batteries for transportation and portable devices emphasize energy density as a primary consideration, here, low-cost, ultra-abundant reactants deployable at massive (TWh) scale are essential. An air-breathing aqueous sulfur flow battery approach with ultralow energy cost is demonstrated at laboratory scale and shown to have economics similar to pumped hydroelectric storage without its geographical and environmental limitations.

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Aqueous redox flow batteries (RFBs) are promising candidates for low-cost, grid-scale energy storage. However, the polymer-based membranes that are used in most prototypical systems fail to prevent crossover of small-molecule reactants, which results in high rates of capacity fade. In this work, we explore the feasibility of a von Alpen sodium superionic conductor Na3.1Zr1.55Si2.3P0.7O11 (NaSICON) as an RFB membrane by examining its resistance, permeability, and interfacial morphology as a function of electrolyte composition and temperature. The resistance of NaSICON is stable for several weeks while immersed in neutral to strongly alkaline ([OH–] = 3 M) aqueous electrolytes, and its permeability to polysulfide-based and permanganate-based small-molecule RFB reactants is negligible compared to that of Nafion. The glassy phase of the NaSICON microstructure at the membrane–electrolyte interface is susceptible to some etching while in contact with aqueous electrolytes containing sodium ions. This etching becomes more extensive when potassium ions are present in the electrolyte, leading in certain instances to complete disintegration of the membrane. A ∼0.7 mm-thin NaSICON membrane can nevertheless support over three weeks of cycling of a ferrocyanide|permanganate flow cell in a strongly alkaline electrolyte ([OH–] = 3 M), with apparently negligible reactant crossover and very low capacity fade (<0.04%/day). NaSICON’s area-specific resistance also decreases dramatically with increasing temperature and decreasing membrane thickness; there is a 5.6× reduction from a 1.19 mm-thick membrane at 18 °C (101 Ωcm2) to a 0.61 mm-thick one at 70 °C (18 Ωcm2). Lowering the thickness of the membrane to 0.1 mm or lower will result in power densities at above ambient temperatures that are comparable to power densities of polymer membrane-containing flow cells. This work highlights the promise of ceramic membranes as effective separators in RFBs operating under neutral pH to strongly alkaline pH conditions.

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