A critical review on progress of the electrode materials of vanadium redox flow battery

Nowadays, renewable energy sources are taken great attention by the researchers and the investors around the world due to increasing energy demand of today's knowledge societies. Since these sources are non-continuous, the effective storage and re-use of the energy produced from renewable energy sources have great importance. Although classical energy storage systems such as lead acid batteries and Li-ion batteries can be used for this goal, the new generation energy storage system is needed for large-scale energy storage applications. In this point, vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) are shinning like a star for this area. VRFBs consist of electrode, electrolyte, and membrane component. The battery electrodes as positive and negative electrodes play a key role on the performance and cyclic life of the system. In this work, electrode materials used as positive electrode, negative electrode, and both of electrodes in the latest literature were complained and presented. From graphene-coated and heteroatom-doped carbon-based electrodes to metal oxides decorated carbon-based electrodes, a large scale on the modification of carbon-based electrodes is available on the electrode materials of the VRFBs. By the discovering of novel electrode components for the battery system, the using of the VRFBs probably increase in a short time for many industrial and residential applications.