We had a total of seven posters presented at the Schaap Symposium.  Our next presenter is Anthony Porath…

Building blocks for multi-electron linked systems for organic redox flow batteries

Anthony Porath, Adina Dumitrascu, Dan Henton, Jason G. Gillmore, Thomas F. Guarr

A series of redox-active compounds were synthesized and electrochemically assessed for their potential use in nonaqueous redox flow batteries (RFBs).  These include electron donating species, the donors, and electron accepting species, the acceptors.  The donor and acceptor moieties are separated with an expensive ion-exchange membrane in traditional RFBs, but when covalently-linked a simple separator is able to be utilized.  The donor/acceptor systems exist in three stable oxidation states during RFB operation: reduced (anolyte), neutral, and oxidized (catholyte) forms.  The pursuit of multi-electron redox-active species would serve to further lower costs.  Decreasing the cost as much as possible is important as it would make it much more economical to introduce RFBs in a large-scale grid storage role.  The synthesis, characterization and preliminary electrochemical investigation of these molecules will be described.