Abstract: Bipolar plates served as one of the key components for flow batteries plays an important role in connecting the positive and negative electrodes and physically separated the electrolyte in the neighboring chambers. The types of bipolar plates reported before included metal plates, graphite plates and composite plates. Composite plates meet the demands of the flow batteries and meanwhile they overcome some shortcomings of metal plates and graphite plates. Carbon fiber has various advantages including good conductivity, mechanical strength and chemical stability. And herein the method of adding carbon fiber into bipolar plates is attracting more and more researchers to improve the performance of the bipolar plates. This paper reviews the recent major research results of employing carbon fiber to reinforce the performance of composite bipolar plates. Moreover, various methods are compared and proposed to the development tendency of reinforcing the properties of composite bipolar plates with carbon fiber.

Key words: flow battery, bipolar plate, composite materials, carbon fiber