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The history of zinc-based flow batteries is longer than that of the vanadium flow battery but has only a handful of demonstration systems. The currently available demo and application for zinc-based flow batteries are zinc-bromine flow batteries, alkaline zinc-iron flow batteries, and alkaline zinc-nickel flow batteries.
Among the above-mentioned zinc-based flow batteries, the zinc-bromine flow batteries are one of the few batteries in which the anolyte and catholyte are completely consistent. This avoids the cross-contamination of the electrolyte and makes the regeneration of electrolytes simple.
Benefiting from the uniform zinc plating and materials optimization, the areal capacity of zinc-based flow batteries has been remarkably improved, e.g., 435 mAh cm-2 for a single alkaline zinc-iron flow battery, 240 mAh cm -2 for an alkaline zinc-iron flow battery cell stack , 240 mAh cm -2 for a single zinc-iodine flow battery .
Although the corrosion of zinc metal can be alleviated by using additives to form protective layers on the surface of zinc [14, 15], it cannot resolve this issue essentially, which has challenged the practical application of zinc-based flow batteries.