Phenazine-Based Anolyte Materials and Their Application in Aqueous Redox Flow Batteries

The redox flow battery has gained increased attention for grid-scale energy storage due to its safety, scalability, and decoupling of power and energy. The current state-of-the-art flow battery systems utilize vanadium, whose present high cost has prevented wide-scale deployment. Recently, organic molecules have emerged as a potential lower-cost replacement for vanadium. These systems offer candidates made from bulk commodity chemicals with tunable molecular properties, such as solubility, redox potential, and molecular size. Presented will be the development of water-soluble, phenazine-based molecules and their application as anolytes in redox flow batteries. The rational design, flow battery implementation, and long-term cyclability of select candidates will be detailed. Derivatives with solubilities greater than 1M and cell voltages >1V (coupled with ferricyanide as catholyte) will be presented.