Cost-Effective Aluminum-Air Battery with Enhanced Performance Using V2O5 Catalyst Together with NH4VO3 Additive in an Alkaline Medium

Aluminum-Air Battery (AAB) is getting attention because of its simple structure, suitable redox potential, and most abundant aluminum metal in the earth's crust, with the expectations to meet or mitigate the energy demand. We designed a cost-effective AAB under ambient conditions, consisting of pure Al as the anode, 4M KOH as an electrolyte, and carbon cloth (CC) as the current collector, and its electrochemical performance is evaluated. The electrochemical cell is modified by adding catalyst V2O5 on CC for improving the electrochemical performance. Further, the 4M KOH electrolyte is modified using 30 mM NH4VO3 additive. These two modifications are also integrated into one, i.e., pure Al-4M KOH + 30 mM NH4VO3-V2O5/CC cell. The corrosion and polarization studies are carried out to understand the impact of additive NH4VO3 mixed in the alkaline electrolyte, on the aluminum anode. The best obtained specific capacity among all the configurations is about 970.49 mAh g−1 at 5 mA discharge current for ~4 h, corresponding to the pure Al-4MKOH + 30 mM NH4VO3-V2O5 AAB configuration. The discharge plateau is observed at 1.3 V for more than 8000 s.