Membrane-Free Zn/MnO2 Flow Battery for Large-Scale Energy Storage

The traditional Zn/MnO2 battery has attracted great interest due to its low cost, high safety, high output voltage, and environmental friendliness. However, it remains a big challenge to achieve long-term stability, mainly owing to the poor reversibility of the cathode reaction. Different from previous studies where the cathode redox reaction of MnO2/MnOOH is in solid state with limited reversibility, here a new aqueous rechargeable Zn/MnO2 flow battery is constructed with dissolution-precipitation reactions in both cathodes (Mn2+/MnO2) and anodes (Zn2+/Zn), which allow mixing of anolyte and catholyte into only one electrolyte and remove the requirement for an ion selective membrane for cost reduction. Impressively, this new battery exhibits a high discharge voltage of approximate to 1.78 V, good rate capability (10C discharge), and excellent cycling stability (1000 cycles without decay) at the areal capacity ranging from 0.5 to 2 mAh cm(-2). More importantly, this battery can be readily enlarged to a bench scale flow cell of 1.2 Ah with good capacity retention of 89.7% at the 500th cycle, displaying great potential for large-scale energy storage.