Redox flow battery (RFB) has been developed in popularity since 1970s and become a promising large-scale energy storage system recently. RFB is an electrochemical device that stores and releases energy through redox reactions of active ion species in electrolyte. The main advantage of RFB over other electrochemical devices such as lead acid battery and lithium ion battery is that the power system could be made very flexible because of the independence of its power from its energy and that its cost per energy in high-capacity systems is particularly low. The drawback is that the ion selective membrane for these RFBs is very expensive and it should satisfy very strict requirements for several aspects including ion selectivity, electric conductivity and chemical stability.
This has led to the recent trend of not using membranes. The advantage of the soluble lead flow battery is the absence of a membrane because only one electrolyte is used.
Kim Ju Song, a researcher at the Faculty of Chemistry, has suggested lead fluoroborate dissolved in aqueous solution of fluoroboric acid as electrolyte of SLFB and investigated the electrochemical characteristics. He chose paste of waste lead acid batteries as a source of lead and investigated its effects on the performance of electrolyte.
The results are as follows.
The conductivity of 1.5 mol/L electrolyte prepared with recycled lead has a peak when the concentration of HBF4 is less than 1.0 mol/L. The kinetic characteristics of Pb2+/Pb and Pb2+/PbO2 are almost the same in both reagent grade lead and recycled lead electrolytes. When electrolytes prepared from recycled lead are used, the average charging efficiency and the average voltage efficiency are all shown to be superior to those of methanesulfonic acid cells.
© 2021 KumChaek University of Technology