The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s contribution is the first ever use of β-cyclodextrin,Simple sugars are composed of just one or two molecules, in contrast to complex carbohydrates like starch. They can be synthesized in the lab, providing a more sustainable alternative to the materials mined for other battery formulas.
Apparently the idea behind the new research was to encapsulate fluorenol in β-cyclodextrin molecules, which would dissolve when introduced to a flow battery solution. That turned out to be not a very efficient way to deliver more fluorenol, but it did result in a fair amount of β-cyclodextrin making its way into the PNNL flow battery.
“This study opens a new avenue to improve the kinetics of aqueous organic flow batteries by modulating the reaction pathway with a homogeneous catalyst,” they added, referring to the action of a catalyst dissolved in a solution, instead of a solid catalyst applied to a surface. The principal investigator on the study, longtime PNNL researcher Wei Wang, emphasized that β-cyclodextrin is a totally new approach to flow battery formulation.
In addition to Wang and first author Ruozhu Feng, other researchers working on the new flow battery are PNNL scientists Ying Chen, Xin Zhang, Peiyuan Gao, Ping Chen, Sebastian Mergelsberg, Lirong Zhong, Aaron Hollas, Yangang Lian, Vijayakumar Murugesan, Qian Huang, Eric Walter and Yuyan Shao, along with Benjamin J. G. Rousseau and Hammes-Schiffer of Yale.