Electrochemical performance of 5 kW all-vanadium redox flow battery stack with a flow frame of multi-distribution channels

In this paper, a flow frame with multi-distribution channels is designed. The electrolyte flow distribution in the graphite felt electrode is simulated to be uniform at some degree with the tool of a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package of Star-CCM+. A 5 kW-class vanadium redox flow battery (VRB) stack composed of 40 single cells is assembled. The electrochemical performance of the VRB stack is investigated. Under the applied current density of 60 mA cm−2 during the charge and discharge processes, the current and energy efficiencies are delivered to be 93.9 and 80.8 %, respectively. A higher average output power of 7.2 kW can be achieved at the current density of 80 mA cm−2 with a lower energy efficiency of 78.4 %. The studies of kW-class VRB stack can be beneficial to the development of large-scale energy storage.