Wednesday, 1 June 2022: 10:00
West Meeting Room 119 (Vancouver Convention Center)
Ferrocenes play increasingly important roles as cathodic components in redox flow battery designs. Peripheral functionalization has become an key tool in the development of ferrocenes as catholytes, as they can impart significant aqueous solubility. In this talk, two new aqueous soluble ferrocene compounds will be introduced that have zwitterionic functional groups pendant to the cyclopentadienyl ring. These compounds can be produced in one step from commercially available reagents and exhibit good stability and reversible electrochemistry in aqueous solution. We tested two such compounds in redox flow battery devices, and both exhibit superior performance characteristics. Notably, there is an observable difference in stability which corresponds to the length of the aliphatic chain between the cationic and anionic units, and we interrogated the factors behind this difference using computational methods.