Reducing capacity fade in vanadium redox flow batteries by altering charging and discharging currents

• Asymmetric current operation is explored as a technique to reduce capacity loss.
• Diffusion-dominated and convection-dominated membranes.
• Capacity loss of a VRFB is found to decrease with increasing charging current.
• The decrease in capacity loss is greater for the diffusion-dominated membrane.
• Voltage efficiency is found to decrease with an increase in the charging current.

In this study, the operation of a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) under asymmetric current conditions (i.e., different current densities during charge and discharge) was investigated as a technique to reduce its capacity loss. Two different membrane types (a convection-dominated membrane and a diffusion-dominated membrane) were analyzed. In these analyses, the charging current density was varied while the discharging current was held constant. For both membranes, it was found that increasing the charging current decreases the net convective crossover of vanadium ions, which reduces the capacity loss of the battery. When the tested membranes were compared, the improvement in capacity retention was found to be larger for the diffusion-dominated membrane (12.4%) as compared to the convection-dominated membrane (7.1%). The higher capacity retention in the diffusion-dominated membrane was attributed to the reduction in the cycling time (and hence, suppressed contribution of diffusion) due to the increased charging current. While asymmetric current operation helps reduce capacity loss, it comes at the expense of a reduction in the voltage efficiencies. Increasing the charging current was found to increase the ohmic losses, which lead to a decrease of 6% and 4.3% in the voltage efficiencies of the convection-dominated and diffusion-dominated membranes, respectively.