A novel flowrate control method for single flow zinc/nickel battery

Recently, the redox zinc-nickel flow battery system with single flow channel was proposed and gained significant attentions. However, the dendrite zinc precipitate on periodic cycling is exceedingly deteriorating the battery life. Besides, the deficient system efficiency is broadly reckoned as the bottleneck of the commercialization for the flow battery system. To address the issues, a small laboratory flow assisted platform was established to test the performance and system electrolyte efficiency. A novel flowrate control method was presented to improve the system efficiency. It is demonstrated that the proposed flowrate control method can intelligently adjust the electrolyte velocities with applied currents and significantly improve the system efficiency without any compromise in the life cycles. The test also shows that even in extended 200 cycling tests, the battery system can maintain a relatively high coulomb efficiency over 95%. In addition, the proposed flowrate control method minimizes the side reaction efficiently. The work of this paper filled up the current gap of the research pertaining to the effects of different flowrates on the Zn/Ni battery system.