Recently, the most commonly used membrane in vanadium redox flow battery(VRFB) are ion exchange membrane, especially, cation exchange membrane. The state-of-the-art perfluorosulfonic acid polymers, Nation^®, are widely used because of their outstanding ion conductivity and chemical stability. However, high cost and vanadium crossover have limited the commercialization of VRFB technology.

Dislike cation exchange membrane, anion exchange membrane has been widely investigated because it could fundamentally decrease permeability of vanadium ions. Nevertheless, the high level of difficulty and low mechanical property have been considered as major obstacles to the practical use of AEM in RFB applications.

In this study, we synthesized hydrocarbon-based AEM materials by Ni(0)-catalyzed coupling polymerization. In addition, synthesized polymers were simply crosslinked by diamine-based cross-linker in order to improve their physical property. We have investigated their physical properties, vanadium crossover and VRFB performance.