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Engineering >> 2023, Volume 28, Issue 9 doi: 10.1016/j.eng.2022.11.008

Highly Conductive Proton Selectivity Membrane Enabled by Hollow Carbon Sieving Nanospheres for Energy Storage Devices

a State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211816, China

b State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China

# These authors contributed equally to this work.

Received: 2022-07-08 Revised: 2022-11-03 Accepted: 2022-11-27 Available online: 2023-03-17

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Abstract

Ion conductive membranes (ICMs) with highly conductive proton selectivity are of significant importance and greatly desired for energy storage devices. However, it is extremely challenging to construct fast proton-selective transport channels in ICMs. Herein, a membrane with highly conductive proton selectivity was fabricated by incorporating porous carbon sieving nanospheres with a hollow structure (HCSNs) in a polymer matrix. Due to the precise ion sieving ability of the microporous carbon shells and the fast proton transport through their accessible internal cavities, this advanced membrane presented a proton conductivity (0.084 S·cm−1) superior to those of a commercial Nafion 212 (N212) membrane (0.033 S·cm−1) and a pure polymer membrane (0.049 S·cm−1). The corresponding proton selectivity of the membrane (6.68 × 105 S·min·cm−3) was found to be enhanced by about 5.9-fold and 4.3-fold, respectively, compared with those of the N212 membrane (1.13 × 105 S·min·cm−3) and the pure membrane (1.56 × 105 S·min·cm−3). Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (LF-NMR) clearly revealed the fast proton-selective transport channels enabled by the HCSNs in the polymeric membrane. The proposed membrane exhibited an outstanding energy efficiency (EE) of 84% and long-term stability over 1400 cycles with a 0.065% capacity decay per cycle at 120 mA·cm−2 in a typical vanadium flow battery (VFB) system.

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