Since the 1760s(the first Industrial Revolution),the development and progress of human society closely depend on the utilization of natural resources.The excessive consumption of fossil energy has caused serious environmental concerns and poses long-term threats to human society.Aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and further enabling the sustainable development of human society,energy revolution is required and the adoption of clean energy from carbon-neutral sources such as solar and wind power is irreversible.However,the electricity produced by renewables is fluctuated,which makes their wide application and integration into the grid very challenging.Energy storage devices,being divided into electrochemical and physical energy storage technologies,can store electricity,while,still can release it as needed,which has been identified as one of the irreversible technologies for achieving carbon neutrality by realizing widespread application of renewables.Among the numerous energy storage technologies,the battery technologies,particularly flow battery technologies are well suited for energy storage applications because of their high security,high efficiency and flexible advantages.Currently,the flow batteries can be divided into two categories according to the redox reactions in anode and cathode:Liquid-liquid flow batteries and hybrid flow batteries.As the representative hybrid flow batteries,the zinc-based flow batteries,which utilize the plating-stripping process of the zinc redox couple in anode,have the merits of high energy density,high safety and low cost,and are very promising for stationary energy storage applications.Coupled with different redox couples in catholyte,multitudinous zinc-based flow batteries have been developed and proposed,such as zinc-bromine flow battery,zinc-iron flow battery,and zinc-nickel flow battery.Critically different from liquid-liquid flow batteries,in which the power and capacity can be decoupled and designed flexibly,the capacity of zinc-based flow batteries is limited by the areal capacity of metallic zinc deposited in anode,which makes it challenging to integrate energy storage systems with a scale up to MW.Currently,the zinc-bromine flow battery and alkaline zinc-iron flow battery are at the commercial demonstration stage,while other zinc-based flow batteries are proposed and developed in succession.Nevertheless,they suffer from some common issues,i.e.,zinc dendrite and accumulation,limited area capacity of anode and low work current density.Tremendous efforts have been devoted to designing advanced materials and cell structures to address these issues,and significant progress has been achieved.In addition to the aforementioned challenges,different kinds of zinc-based flow batteries also encounter many issues individuality,such as the corrosion of bromine in zinc-bromine flow battery,low kinetics of nickel cathode in zinc-nickel flow battery,the hydrolysis of iron ions in zinc-iron flow battery.These individual issues also hinder their widespread application.In this review,we will provide a detailed introduction and discussion on the development of zinc-based flow battery systems from the perspective of engineering aspects.We will also summarize the universality and individuality of the issues associated with zinc-based flow batteries,as well as the recent progresses and current status of zinc-based flow batteries.Combined with the practical requirements and development trend of zinc-based flow battery technologies,their future development and research direction are summarized.
energy storage technologieszinc-based flow batteriesdevelopment processcommon key technical problems
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