Carbonaceous porous electrodes are ubiquitous to advanced electrochemical systems where they are responsible for multiple critical functions in the cell. However, our current arsenal of materials is limited to carbonaceous fibrous electrodes which are manufactured using various mechanical methods (e.g. paper making, weaving, hydro-entangling) resulting in idiosyncratic structures such as papers, cloths, and felts. These fabrication methods involve multiple complex subprocessing steps impacting the final manufacturing cost and offer limited versatility to control the electrode microstructure and surface composition, which ultimately limits the performance of the electrochemical cell. Thus, there is a need to develop new material sets with precise control over microstructure and composition while employing synthetic methods that are compatible with large scale manufacturing.

In this presentation, I will discuss a new approach to synthesize porous electrodes suitable for electrochemical flow reactors based on non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS). NIPS is a simple and versatile fabrication method that can be used to synthesize morphologically-diverse electrode microstructures (isoporous, pore size gradients, and multimodal porosity) by tuning simple parameters in the polymer solution, such as polymer concentration, solvent type, and temperature. In this work, I will discuss our efforts to design tailored electrodes for redox flow batteries (RFBs), which are promising for grid-scale energy storage if their costs can be significantly reduced. Using a suite of microscopic, spectroscopic, and electrochemical diagnostic tools, we elucidate synthesis-property-performance relationships of the NIPS electrodes. In the final part, I will discuss the use of NIPS-electrodes in all-vanadium RFBs. Although nascent, NIPS emerges as a promising platform to engineer porous electrodes for RFBs and other convection-enhanced electrochemical systems.