Glucose-derived hydrothermal carbons as energy storage booster for vanadium redox flow batteries

Abstract

Abstract Fabricating of high performance electrodes by a sustainable and cost effective method is essential to the development of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs). In this work, an effective strategy is proposed to deposit carbon nanoparticles on graphite felts by hydrothermal carbonization method. This in-situ method minimizes the drop off and aggregation of carbon nanoparticles during electrochemical testing. Such integration of felts and hydrothermal carbons (HTC) produces a new electrode that combines the outstanding electrical conductivity of felts with the effective redox active sites provided by the HTC coating layer. The presence of the amorphous carbon layers on the felts is found to be able to promote the mass/charge transfer, and create oxygenated/nitrogenated active sites and hence enhances wettability. Consequently, the most optimized electrode based on a rational approach delivers an impressive electrochemical performance toward VRFBs in wide range of current densities from 200 to 500 mA cm−2. The voltage efficiency (VE) of GFs-HTC is much higher than the VEs of the pristine GFs, especially at high current densities. It exhibits a 4.18 times increase in discharge capacity over the pristine graphite felt respectively, at a high current density of 400 mA cm−2. The enhanced performance is attributed to the abundant active sites from amorphous hydrothermal carbon, which facilitates the fast electrochemical kinetics of vanadium redox reactions. This work evidences that the glucose-derived hydrothermal carbons as energy storage booster hold great promise in practical VRFBs application.