A single-membrane battery can survive two different acidity levels at once without breaking down.
April 20, 2026
Original Paper
Stable single-membrane pH-decoupling aqueous all-organic flow batteries
SSRN · 6601544
The Takeaway
This aqueous organic flow battery uses hydrogen-bonding redox pairs to prevent crossover contamination between its two sides. The design simplifies the traditional three-chamber requirement into a more efficient single-membrane system. This breakthrough makes high-voltage organic batteries much more stable and cheaper to manufacture. Previous attempts at this pH-decoupling suffered from rapid degradation and low power output. We can now build large-scale energy storage for the grid using simple organic molecules rather than rare metals.
From the abstract
The advancement of pH-decoupling aqueous organic flow batteries (AOFBs) would enable high cell voltage and circumvent challenges in molecular engineering. However, traditional pH-decoupling AOFBs need the complicated three-chamber, two-membrane configuration and suffer from severe crossover issue. In the present work, stable pH-decoupling aqueous all-organic flow batteries (AAOFBs), separated with a single ion-exchange membrane, were first constructed by using the crossover-free NH2/NH3+ grafted