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Polymeric membranes with aligned zeolite nanosheets for sustainable energy storage

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 1080–1091 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Membrane technologies with low environmental impacts and ease of use have a wide spectrum of applications, with the potential to provide more sustainable solutions in domains such as water, energy and pollution treatment. However, the design of membranes is subject to a trade-off between ion conductivity and selectivity. Here we show a composite polymeric membrane that breaks this dilemma and supports both high proton conductivity (80.1 mS cm−1) and good vanadium ion selectivity (2.01 × 105 S min cm−3). Underlying this synthetic success is a flow-processing technique through which zeolite nanosheet fillers are oriented in a preferred direction throughout a polymer Nafion matrix. As a result, pairing this aligned membrane with a vanadium flow battery leads to a high energy efficiency of >80% at 200 mA cm−2 and remarkable stability over 1,000 cycles. This work enables the design of membranes that combine otherwise mutually exclusively properties for many possible applications beyond energy storage.

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Fig. 1: Structure and formation process schematics of aligned zeolite nanosheets in a polymer membrane.
Fig. 2: Structure characterizations of polymer membrane featuring aligned ZNs.
Fig. 3: Control over the alignment of ZNs in the polymer membrane.
Fig. 4: Membrane properties.
Fig. 5: Flow battery performance.

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Data availability

All data generated and/or analysed in this study are included in this published article and its Supplementary Information file. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2021YFB3801301), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 22278211, 22075076 and 21908054) and Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, China

    Yongsheng Xia, Hongyan Cao, Yu Xia, Dezhu Zhang, Kang Huang, Weihong Xing & Wanqin Jin

  2. State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

    Fang Xu, Yuxin Chen, Liheng Dai, Kai Qu, Cheng Lian & Zhi Xu

Authors
  1. Yongsheng Xia
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Contributions

Yongsheng Xia, K.H. and Z.X. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. K.H., W.X., W.J. and Z.X. supervised the project. Yongsheng Xia conducted the experiments and data analysis. H.C. helped with some of the battery performance tests. Y.C. and C.L. contributed to the computational fluid dynamics simulation. F.X. contributed to the MD simulation. Yu Xia and D.Z. helped with some of the material synthesis. L.D. and K.Q. helped with some of the characterizations. Yongsheng Xia and K.H. organized and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the discussion and revision of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kang Huang, Wanqin Jin or Zhi Xu.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Yi-Chun Lu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Experimental methods, Supplementary Figs. 1–60, Tables 1–3 and Notes 1–3.

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Xia, Y., Cao, H., Xu, F. et al. Polymeric membranes with aligned zeolite nanosheets for sustainable energy storage. Nat Sustain 5, 1080–1091 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00974-w

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