Textile industry pollutant shows promise in redox flow batteries

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A pollutant from the textiles industry could be given a second life as a material for redox flow batteries, which are large, rechargeable liquid-based devices that store electrical energy at grid scale.

University at Buffalo (UB) scientists in New York have found that methylene blue, a common ingredient in wastewater from textile mills, is good at storing and releasing energy when dissolved in water.

The research appeared online on Aug. 13 in the journal ChemElectroChem.

"Methylene blue is a widely used dye. It can be harmful to health, so it's not something you want to dump into the environment without treating it," said lead researcher Timothy Cook, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "There's been a lot of work done on ways to sequester methylene blue out of water, but the problem with a lot of these methods is that they're expensive and generate other kinds of waste products."

"But what if instead of just cleaning the water up, we could find a new way to use it? That's what really motivated this project," said first author Anjula Kosswattaarachchi, a UB PhD student in chemistry.

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